Harry Potter’s latest movie has broken box office records in the very first weekend of its release in the US. Even in India, the Potter mania has reached frenzied heights with movie halls running to packed houses, reflecting a veritable dearth of tickets. Everybody is awaiting with bated breath the release of J.K. Rowling’s next book as there is a lot of curiosity generated over Potter’s death for which millions of Potter fans are passing sleepless nights the world over.
Being a great Harry Potter fan myself, I can also understand the excitement my eight year old son feels when he makes me promise for a copy of the book on the release date itself in India. But, at the same time, one thought lurks somewhere in my mind’what has happened to our good old Roopkathas and Thakurmar Jhulis (Grandma’s bag of stories.. to translate literally.. the essence can never be translated)? My son, and of course most of them in the same age group, has not even heard of such stories .. leave aside reading them. This is especially prevalent because of our fetish for everything western ... be it books, movies, food, dress etc. Most of our children know the stories of ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs’, to even the lesser known ‘Puss in the Boots'’ but haven’t even heard of Byangama Byangomi ( fictitious birds of yesteryears who can talk like human beings and are always there to save a prince or a sailor in distress!),or Lalkomol Nilkomol ( two princes who mutate into two big eggs .. one blue and one red to save themselves from the queen who is actually a witch in disguise)! These stories are so beautiful yet so simple’ maybe the absence of twists and turns and the entire predictability of the passing episodes fail to stir the imaginations of today’s kids.

These stories and fairy tales were a quintessential part of our growing up and I can vouch for the fact that the mystical mazes in which the hapless princess or the good prince gets entangled in, only to emerge victorious from a seemingly impossible situation, can still give goose pimples to a kid of 5-6 years! But, the packaging and publishing is so poor in India compared to the foreign publications, that they fail to attract the attention of a budding reader. There are hardly a few sketches, that also quite shabby, compared to the glossy and picturesque presentations in a Fairy Tale book or a Goodnight Stories published by the overseas media houses. The crux of the matter, though remains the same’the final triumph of good over evil, or the wanderlust of an ailing prince who knows his days are numbered’these ideas are universal. Barring a few widely acclaimed fairy tales and stories with a moral from India, there are hardly a few takers for these age old classics. I am not at all proclaiming that our children should not read the likes of ‘Ugly Duckling’ or ‘Peter Pan’.. in fact these are so fascinating that they can abolish the age barriers and transport us to an arena of long lost childhood innocence. The magic realism of Harry Potter transcends all set genres of fiction, yet the fairy tale kind of atmosphere compels the child to quiver and fervently wish to join Harry, Hermione and all the happenings at Hogwarts! This kind of writing has diminished to a great extent in India.. and if we do not consciously make an effort to introduce the future generation to the rare gems of Indian folk tales, classics and fairy tales a day will come when stories from ‘Panchatantra’ , ‘Jataka Tales’,’ Dadaji ki kahaniya’ etc will only be used as reference material for somebody doing a thesis on Oriental studies and Indian fairy tales!