A Thank You note

    

"Some people come into our lives and quickly go.
Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts,
and we are never, ever the same."
~ Flavia Weedn

Mr Anant Pai or Uncle Pai, as every avid Amar Chitra Katha reader knew him as, passed away on the 24th of February. There have been many beautiful eulogies, some by very famous personalities, written to honour this man, who touched many of our childhoods.

This is not an eulogy. This is a simple and short thank you note - a note to express thanks to the man, who like no other, managed to bring fun and laughter to my childhood along with an indelible awareness of our mythology and our rich and varied cultural heritage. 

Studying in an English school in the 1980s in India, you grow up reading Enid Blytons, Famous Fives, Hardy boys and Nancy Drew as a child and then you graduate to Alistair Maclean and W.E. Johns till you find P.G. Wodehouse and till Sidney Sheldon finds you! You end up having little or no contact with your own roots and your own culture unless its a summer holiday and your grandma has some free time from cooking your favourite food and decides to tell you a story from the Ramayana or Mahabharata. Even then its likely, you end up thinking why bother about this highly boring tale of primitive people who fought with bows and arrows when you'd rather return to the exciting adventurous world of your favourite detectives or comic book superheroes - the inimitable Phantom a.k.a the Ghost who walks or the mysterious Mandrake . 

You tend to grow up in a world where when you think drama, you are thinking Shakespeare and not Kalidasa; where bedtime stories mean Grimm's fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen and not tales from the Panchatantra or the Hitopadesh. 

Given this context, it is no mean feat that Mr Pai achieved what he did! He made an entire generation (and perhaps many more) of people being brought up with little or no connection to our culture, get familiar with it and at the same time, made sure we enjoyed every minute of getting to know it!

He brought me in touch with a whole new world I was unfamiliar with and made me appreciate what I was previously apathetic to. He brought tales of Tenali Rama and Suppandi and Kalia and Birbal, when I needed to laugh. He managed to make me curious and eager to know more about Ashoka, Prithviraj Chauhan, Akbar, Shivaji and Razia Sultan than any history book ever would. 

While I ran away when my mother started harping on how little I know of our mythology, he held me spellbound with tales of Krishna, Rama, Garuda, the Dasavatar and the Samudramanthan (Churning of the Ocean for Amrit). Today whatever I know of our most complex epic, the Mahabharat, and my mom should be proud as I know quite a bit, is all thanks to the 4 large volumes of Amar Chitra Katha, I am a proud owner of. 

I read about Kalidas in school but it was because of Amar Chitra Katha that I first appreciated his immortal and beautiful dramas. And its thanks to him that I first learnt about the great Bengali mystic Ramakrishna and his teachings and about the great freedom fighters from my land. He stoked my curiosity enough for me to ask my dad for my very first copy of the actual book Panchatantra, when I was 8. And it is he I should be thankful to, for having turned out to be one of those, who when asked "who wrote the Ramayana?", don't end up saying, "Ramanand Sagar"!

And today, as I look with the lens of a parent who wants her 2 sons (who will probably speak with an accent, live abroad and otherwise have little interest in the motherland), to know as much about the country we come from, its mythology, its heroes, its history, its folk takes and take pride in it, I would like to thank you even more Mr Pai, for creating Amar Chitra Katha. I have saved all my Amar Chitra Kathas for them - so that we can journey back together through the comics to the world I discovered and found so much joy in.

"Not what we give, but what we share, For the gift, without the giver, is bare" ~ James Russell Lowell