Amar Chitra Katha and a nostalgic dive back in time

Image Courtesy: AmarChitraKatha.com

True to its name, Amar Chitra Katha has always been the lively comic book with the tinge of Indian culture. When I was a kid, these books were unaffordable to my Mom (and my father never bothered to buy me books), so I always had to read them at libraries. But for my nephew, that is not the case. All of us keep buying Amar Chitra Katha whenever we catch them at the book store. But funny side is that he fancies watching Hattori (!) on Nick, Noddy and Mr. Bean on Pogo rather than read something!
The lovely digital pictures that Tata Sky puts directly to home from the satellite without interruptions isn't helping him much, either.

Looking at this little announcement of sorts on The Hindu today, I remembered how we used to search corners of the library to fish out the unread titles. The number of titles released in this series is huge. I used to enjoy the Kannada translations of these books the most. Apparently, the translations had gone into good hands and we never felt that it was actually a translated version that we were reading. The then ignorance and quality of Kannada on the translated books sometimes made me believe that Amar Chitra Katha first came out in Kannada and was then translated to English (which clearly was not).

I distinctly remember reading a book in this series titled "Amritha Manthana" (ಅಮೃತ ಮಂಥನ) with text accompanying the illustrations in Kannada. This title was among the few books I was able to get my parents to purchase in those days with a lot of persuasion. I literally owned the book except for my elder brother exercising his rights over the books bought by my parents (by scribbling on them with pen) although he never fancied reading them. I lost the books later from my collection when I handed these and several other books over to my niece. It is true though that I did regret this later whenever I got nostalgic about these books. But my collection of books was never less than two boxful thanks to my maternal Uncles who have have voracious appetite for reading and have huge and very interesting personal collection of books. The books they finished reading more often than not used to land into my personal collection. Reading Kannada books was also something that I picked up from them.

The schools I was made to study in, had more English books than Kannada. Sometimes books with strong North Indian influence like Chacha Chaudary were made available, and were appealing too for us to read then. Books like Tinkle and Tinkle Digest from the same house of publishing as that of Amar Chitra Katha were the clear favourites though. At times, we used to buy "BalamangaLa" (ಬಾಲಮಂಗಳ) that was getting published from Magadi Road in Bangalore (owned by a Kottayam, Kerala based publishing company). All these books although sound utterly stupid when I read them now which is quite obvious (they're targeted for kids/teenagers).

Just recently at a book fair I spotted back the book "Amritha Manthana" (ಅಮೃತ ಮಂಥನ) in the Amar Chitra Katha series, but this one was in English titled "Churning of the Ocean". Reading it was nowhere close to the experience of reading the Kannada version of it. Although I picked it up for my nephew, I started looking for Kannada copies of Amar Chitra Katha in various other book stores, but in vain. Even the on-line Amar Chitra Katha store doesn't seem to offer Kannada books on it yet. There was once a time when my personal book collection had Amar Chitra Katha titles in Sanskrit too!

But any day, Amar Chitra Katha with titles on Indian mythology, Indian legends is the best gift one can give to kids, nephews and nieces - which would be less of Hattori, Pokemon and more of our own nation, India :-)

Note: Kannada Language version of this post is available here.