CHENNAI: A sparrow went in search of food for his hungry female. On its way back home, while drinking nectar from a fragrant thaazhampoo (screw pine flower), it gets caught in the flower, as it closed in the dusk. Then the little bird, as described in a folk tale, had no other option, but stay inside the dark space enveloped by the flower.”
Coimbatore-based AS Mohanagiri, who rendered this story into English, could have felt the pain of the sparrow more than anyone, since he knows how life would be in a dark world with himself being a visually-challenged man. Nevertheless, he rendered 25 such folk tales into English and anthologised them into an e-book for Kindle, which has received a five-star reviews.
Titled Bed-time Stories for Grown-ups: Folktales from India, the tales have been ‘trans-created’ into English from the Tamil book Kongu Naattupura Kadhaikal: Thokuppum Aayvum, penned by M Senthil Kumar, a professor of Tamil in the Government Arts College, Coimbatore. Senthil has also been editing the UGC-listed magazine Peyal, a journal for Tamil research and studies.
Mohanagiri, who is an English professor from the same institution, says, “After I received Senthil Kumar’s book in the PDF format, I went through the complete folktales, which he had collected and compiled. The screen-reading software Non-visual Desktop Access (NVDA), specially designed for visually-challenged people, helped me render the folktales into English. As the software reads the e-scripts of all Indian languages, it read to me the complete folktales in Tamil. Having listened to it, I typed the tales in English on my computer, again with the help of the software.” Bearing testimony to the fact that the areas in information technology are so surprising, the software, while you type, informs everything in its voice as spelling and grammatical errors, selection of font sizes and font colours, paragraphing and so on.
“I thank such a wonderful technology, which has guided me in making my first e-book. As I have trans-created the local tales with an objective of taking them to new horizons, the book never hinders a foreign reader in his smooth journey of reading it. I took around a couple of months to produce this book,” he adds.
Mohanagiri, who is also an alumnus of the Government Arts College, says that the folktales of the Kongu region, which were passed down by word-of-mouth, reflect how life was in the past.
“To render them into English, I chose around 25 folktales that reflect the lives as lived by our forefathers. For instance, the tale of the sparrow, which goes in search of food for its female, fails to return home by night and gets chided by its female the next morning. The tale is a symbolic depiction of a yesteryear Kongu family which bound husbands to return home by night wherever they went for work,” Mohanagiri points out.