3 Review(s)

Grandparents' Bag of Stories (Book Review): Lockdown lessons for the youngOnce again, Sudha Murty, with her maternal vibe, sits down to her young readers and opens her bag of stories. This time, the storyteller pulls out a utopian lockdown handbook for children. When the future generation sits down to uncover the year of the pandemic, Murty's Grandparents' Bag of Stories will reveal what a day in the lockdown amid the global pandemic looked like. Published by Puffin Books, the book is second in her series of grandparents' stories, the first being Grandma's Bag of Stories.The parents, reeling under pressures of working from home, decide to send their children to the grandparents' home right before the lockdown and the rest is all 'a story'. As one flips pages, Murty's spell deepens and one travels down memory lane, into juvenescence. A summer dream blossoming in grandparents' backyards begins. Each of her stories comes with an important life lesson for the children. Her stories of rice and wheat teach one the importance of foodgrains during troubled times like that of the lockdown. The Magic Beans teaches not to be greedy, The Goddess of Luck teaches the importance of good karma, The Mouse that Became a Mouse tells us to accept what has been given to us, A Word of Honour tells one to be true to his word, A Ship on the Land teaches one that skills and talent matter more than appearance and The Greatest Medicine of All talks about how a disease grips the world every hundred years, its dangers and that hygiene is the greatest medicine of all.In a world of Alexa and audiobooks, Murty is one of the very few writers keeping the art of traditional storytelling via the elderly (read grandparents) alive through her work. Murty's stories transport you into the calm and comfort of the golden days. Her first reviewers are undoubtedly her grandchildren. "I miss my grandchildren very much as they live in London, so whenever I write a story, I call them over Zoom and narrate it. They loved The Arrival of Rice and the Children, A World of Wheat and The Magic Beans stories. They were fascinated to hear stories of their origins. I try and narrate one story a day to them," she tells us.Murty affectionately gifts children life lessons blended with our own traditions in her stories. What's Luck Got to do with It boasts of the Indian traditional education system where lessons were imparted through stories. She carefully notes the stark difference with the western school of thought where stories are rather bedtime narrations. In Forty Days of Quarantine, grandparents set a timetable for homeschooling children while teaching traditional games like hopscotch, scrabble, snakes and ladders and ludo and how to contribute in the household chores, away from the world of online life.