The Small Boat: Book One

Somewhere in a small government colony in Jharkhand, in the monsoon of early 2000s, a nine-year-old boy found a green encyclopedia in his older brother's cupboard. He had been looking for paper to fold into boats. He found something better. >This book is written with two kinds of reader in mind. The first is a child who loves a good story. Titu, Kirti, Sonu, Subbu, and Rajat are not exceptional children. They are not geniuses or prodigies. They are ordinary colony kids - bickering, enthusiastic, easily distracted, deeply loyal to each other - and the world they live in is the warm, noisy, particular world of late 1990s - early 2000s Indian town. If you simply want to spend time in that world, this book is for you, and you need not think about science at all. The second kind of reader is a child who, somewhere in the middle of the story, notices something: that Titu's thinking has a shape to it. He reads. He wonders. He builds something imperfect. He works out what went wrong. He tries again. This is not a special talent. It is a habit - the habit of treating the world as something that can be understood, one question at a time. If this book quietly encourages that habit, it will have done its most important work.

Pagina's: 90, Paperback, Independently published