Delhi-based Ritika Subhash is an engineer-turned-educationist by profession, and a storyteller, blogger and children’s book author by passion. Currently, she’s the Director of Schools at Mangahigh.com, a London-based ed-tech firm. Her second book Ramya’s Bat is all set to release at the upcoming book fair in January 2019. “It is a wonderful rhyme-filled story about a girl’s love for cricket. It touches upon the issue of gender stereotyping in sports and how a determined little girl perseveres in following her dreams,” she says.
Reading was a big part of her growing up years. “I was at ease in the warm company of books. As I entered high school, followed by engineering and then masters in information systems in the US, books and stories got left behind somewhere, only to come back to me when I returned to India in 2010,” she recounts.
Subhash changed gears and started working in the field of education and enabling technology-led learning in classrooms. In her interactions with kids, she found that children have an inherent need to connect and to be heard and that storytelling helps put them at ease to share their inner world honestly. The realisation became more profound after she became a parent. She signed up for a story-telling certification with Geeta Ramanujam’s Kathalaya.
“I started reading children’s books and short stories to my son as early as six months, but it is difficult to read a book when you are trying to put a kid to sleep and have lights out. I started creating stories to narrate to him at night. Making up these stories helped me nurture my creativity while also helping stoke my son’s imagination,” she shares.
The young author believes that with stories well-told, children magically transform into good listeners and are more likely to absorb ideas. “My first book, Let’s Talk About My Feelings, is a picture book with 12 short stories, in rhyme, for early readers, with each story followed by a question that urges the children to talk about their emotions. The idea behind this book was to get parents and children talking about sensitive issues such as bullying, new sibling’s arrival, empathy and more,” says the mother of a four-year-old boy.
(The author writes on food and entertainment.)