Comics and Magazines!

I think it was at a train station that I got my first ever so called comic book. I faintly remember I couldn’t read then and my mother read out the comic’s name – LOT POT. Ofcourse I didn’t understand what that meant and she had to explain it. The expression that can come closest to explaining what Lot-Pot means in English would be “RTOFL”. Well inside it didn’t much keep up its promise though I guess the concepts of pairs – a tall and a short guy ( lambu chotu) or a fat and a thin one ( Motu Patlu) was considered a sure fire hit with mindless children like us. I remember being mighty disappointed with the whole thin colourful comic. Had it not been called LOT-POT and got my hopes up, just maybe I might have enjoyed it a bit more.

The next one I came across was called Champak. It had something to do with a trying-to-be-oversmart rabbit. That too wasn’t so good as it had very few pictures and too many words.

A good thing happened and I acquired some reading skills before I tried any more of the indigenous Indian reading material for kids. Chandamama was something of a well known monthly magazine and some kids even had subscriptions to it
( or it came with the newspaper). It had a very typical cover with the logo on the left and the red band across which was emblazoned its name. You could see the same in any language ( was published in several) and you knew it to be Chandamama!

It was a collection of short-stories with the highlight being the Vikram-Betaal episode. ( the first few times I flipped through Chandamama, I always used to jump this because I found the picture of the ferocious looking Vikram with a blood stained sword too disturbing. It grieved me to see them repeating the same story every edition almost as if on purpose! ) The rest of the stories were full of morals and I remember that the illustrations always had very neatly dressed people and almost empty houses. The rich mans house would have some pots and pans as well as a bed. The poor people always had just 4 bare walls. Each one of the characters of all the stories put together seemed related to each other because they dressed almost alike and well, resembled each other!

In class 2, I read my first simple Enid Blytons like so many small children around the world. It was limited to Noddy and Amelia Jane the Naughty Doll stories. Was simple and it was fun. I particularly remember the story of the acorns around the dolls neck which suddenly sprouted and sent shock shivers down her spine or something to that affect.

One day my father returned from a trip to Delhi and got me an Enid Blyton “book”. It was called “Those Dreadful Children” and I remember being so wary of it because it had real small print! Not at all like the one word per square inch print of Noddy! But read I did and how I enjoyed it and how much it influenced me! It made me so conscious of good behavior and manners.
In the book, the father takes aside his unruly sons and teaches them “how to behave with girls” and goes on to tell them the girls are more delicate beings and hence one should be a gentleman and so on and so forth.
So deep rooted did this book become in me that in one of the fights/arguments with some boys at school I went on loudly – hasn’t your father taught you how to behave with girls? I can never forget the look that boy gave me! He must have thought I have landed from Mars or something. Forget teaching their sons how to behave with girls, fathers back then never had the time to teach their sons to behave at all. It was all well as we were!

I am sure all of us graduated slowly into the Secret Seven first and the Famous Five soon after that. The girls secretly hoped to be in a boarding such as St Claires and Mallory towers and then soon after ditched Enid Blyton and branched off into the Nancy Drew books. When that happened and the boys picked up hardy boys, it was a sure sign that you were now “grown up”

You could outgrow Noddy, you could outgrow Enid Blyton and you could even outgrow Nancy Drew. One thing you could never outgrow was AMAR CHITRA KATHA comics. You could be disowned by your own if you ever dared to say that these were not nice!
More than the thrill of reading one was turning to the yellow coloured page at the end of the comic and tick which all you had already read!
Oh the joy of acquiring a new Amar Chitra Katha and adding it to your collection. (A collection that never really grew because so many kids were borrowing from it and writing their names on some and becoming their second hand owners! )That title and that familiar Surya logo on the top. Centre-middle. Now that is the correct alignment. The new one with a square frame and a glossy thick cover and the logo on the left! no no no, aint the real thing.

Everyone wanted to be your friend if you had some rare titles. The coveted ones were – Rishyashringa, Kounchini, Raja Raja Chola ( fascinating that double Raja) , Devi Choudhrani ( sold because of the beautiful lady with the gold coins on the cover), Abhimanyu, Savitri and that fiery Anand Math!
Absolutely loved them! And I think we learnt more from them than we ever did from the best history lessons at school.

At about the age of 10 or so, we reached the pinnacle of being intellectually inclined when we started reading the Readers Digest. You could always lay your hands on old copies from somewhere – doctors waiting rooms being one example. Back then it used to be much thicker than it is now and used to have the index right there –bang- on the top page. No slim editions, no gloss. Just a coloured band on the rib.
Inside was a host of articles – the one or two political ones you would skip. There was always one like “I survived a plane crash” or “ how I lived through 6 months in a sewage pipe” or “I was attacked by a grizzly”. These were highly motivational stories back then. But what pulled us to the Readers Digest was the humour. Life’s like that!, Humour in Uniform, All in a days work, Quotable quotes etc were devoured first! They even had a page to increase your vocabulary. But man weren’t they notorious for the junk post you got. All of us got taken in by the “special prize inside” envelopes when we first got them. Oh now, we have smartened up. Yes sir!