Category Archives: Kids

What became of Hadji?

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When I was a kid there were no cartoon characters that looked like me on TV. Well, there may have been one that kind of did, but we won’t get into that.

An anonymous tipster directs our attention to Nickelodeon‘s site where a cute round-faced little Indian girl named Maya is on a mission to bring cultural awareness to today’s kids through short animated clips. There are two clips you can click on to enjoy: Happy Holi Maya and Maya the Indian Princess. The animator is Kavita Ramchandran, who I couldn’t seem to find a whole lot about on the web. I presume that these clips run on live television.

In what is surely a symptom of my need to find a woman, I thought the animated mom in the clips was kind of cute.

maya3.jpg

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Kids’ books for bookish kids

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Got a desi young’un in your house who loves reading, or one who’s brown-friendly? Author Pooja Makhijani has put together a great bibliography of children’s literature with desi connections (disclaimer: she’s a friend). Check it out.

How these series come back to haunt me now, with their sense of ownership over the world, with the ways in which they defined a world… With all the ways in which they owned words. Strawberry blonde. We read these books, but there was no one like us in any of them. [Betsy, Stacy, Sejal, Tib by Sejal Shah]

Sadly, this plot summary of a picture book for drooling infants could just as easily be a blurb for the books of the mango/mehndi genre 😉

Chachaji’s Cup
Uma Krishnaswami, Illustrated by Soumya Sitaraman

A boy learns about his family history and the Partition of India from his great uncle, through stories told over a beloved old teacup.

Previous posts: Haroun, Ghee Happy

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Flaming purple Kali

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Sounds like a cocktail, no? Pixar artist Sanjay Patel illustrates Hindu mythology in a style reminiscent of Suck, Demian 5, Virgin and Bewitched (thanks, Turbanhead). It’s gorgeous work, although his Rama does look a bit much like Hrithik Roshan, and any kid-safe interpretation of Kali is bound to cross the line into kitsch.

Patel’s site says he came up with its name, Ghee Happy, via obscure analogy: reducing the rich strokes of Hindu iconography to their essence is like clarifying butter into ghee. He self-published a children’s book of Hindu gods and also sells 11″x17″ prints on his site. Check it out if you have any little ones in need of full-color indoctrination or just dig the visual style.

Update: Drawn has more (thanks, Harry). A commenter there says:

We were actually joking with Sanjay that he SHOULD do this with every religion, but I guess the problem with the monotheistic religions is that there would only be ONE page in the book…