By Bijal Vachharajani 

When Bijal Vachharajani is not reading Harry Potter, she can be found looking for tigers in the jungles of India. In her spare time, she works to fund the trips and books. She did this by working as the Editor at Time Out Bengaluru. After having studied climate change at the University for Peace, she now writes about education and sustainable development and is a consultant with Fairtrade Asia Pacific. She is also one half of BAM! Books, an Instagram-led project which talks about children's and Young Adult books. She tweets at @bijal_v. 

My mother’s kitchen operates on a seasonal calendar, something I took for granted for a long time. As winter would approach, wondrous smells of ghee, whole wheat flour and jaggery simmering in a kadhai would tell us that godpapdi was being prepared that day. When rain would slow down our work schedule, spinach would no longer be cooked in the house, because mum believed that insects nestled in the palak leaves during the monsoon season. Summer would herald the impatient wait for our regular mango seller, until finally bowls of aam ras, chilled to golden goodness, arrived on the lunch table.

There’s an anticipation to eating seasonally – nothing beats drizzling notun gur over your creamy white dahi in winter, nibbling on slices of raw mango slathered with salt and red chilli powder at the beginning of summer, and wrestling with masala bhutta cobs in one hand and umbrellas in the other during the monsoon season. Which is pretty much what Neema, the protagonist of the picture book "What’s Neema Eating Today?" does – eat with relish but seasonally. And Priya Kuriyan has created the perfect Neema – a child who eats with abandon, enjoys her food, while revelling in nature’s bounty. Really, this picture book is all down to the extremely talented Priya!

Today with technology, our food’s taken on a homogenous quality which while convenient, is almost boring. Watermelons are available through the year, never mind that they taste bland most months. Strawberries taste like little cardboard pieces, while the mysteriously-available-in-March-mangoes are best left on trees to ripen naturally. I stopped eating bananas for a while when I read this story about how to keep up with our insatiable demand, farmers were being forced to ripen the fruits with the help of harmful chemicals. And I suspect Neema would definitely turn up her nose at it as well.

Which is why I was excited to do a book on eating as per the season, when Yamini Vijayan of Pratham Books StoryWeaver asked me to write one (I commission and edit a set of STEM picture books on environment for them). Of course, one of the challenges was leaving out autumn and spring. In school, we learn about the five types of seasons – spring, summer, monsoon, autumn, and winter. But most parts of India experience summer, monsoon, and winter, and which is why we decided to concentrate on those seasons. And Priya has captured the seasons beautifully – from the glowering clouds that roll up during the monsoon to that gorgeous feeling of being outdoors on a crisp, winter day. It’s all in there.

Neema is inspired from some of the work I have done with Fairtrade over the last couple of years – I have had the privilege to meet farmers and I am always gobsmacked at the kind of seasonal and local variety you find in our country. At the Fair Trade Alliance Kerala seed fest, a farmer from the Mananthavady taluk in the Wayanad district of Kerala had put up a dazzling display of 26 kinds of chillies. Another farmer who is part of Chetna Organic in Telangana is saving a local variety of red gram seed and growing it for her family. In Odisha, I sampled kala jira rice, which when cooked is so fragrant, that you will forget basmati in a trice.   

 

   

Copyright Bijal Vachharajani/Fairtrade India

However, not all’s well in the world of food diversity. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that since the “beginning of this century, about 75 per cent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost.” And climate change is impacting agriculture at an unprecedented pace – the FAO says that the “change in seasonality attributed to climate change can lead to certain food products becoming more scarce at certain times of year. Such seasonal variations in food supply, along with vulnerabilities to flooding and fire, can make livelihoods more vulnerable at certain times of the year. Although these impacts might appear indirect, they are important because many marginal livelihood groups are close to the poverty margin, and food is a key component of their existence.”

Atram Kusu Bai is a Fairtrade farmer with Chetna Organic in Telangana. A cotton farmer, she's also preserving a red gram seed that is indigenous the region. Image copyright Bijal Vachharajani/Fairtrade India

It’s not easy always to eat seasonally, when you’re shopping online or faced with a dazzling array of apples, kiwis and oranges from far-flung corners of the world. Our food system has increasingly become complex. But ask your fruit seller, keep a track of seasons, and enjoy eating them. After all, fruits and vegetables taste best when in season. Or simply like the meme goes:  Neema eats with the seasons. Neema is cool. Be like Neema.

(Psssst... we had a super fun, informative twitter chat with Bijal on January 4th. If you missed it, you can read it here on Storify!)

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In January, 2015, Pratham Books sent out a big, bold ask into the universe! We asked illustrators to delight millions of children by creating a story in 6 frames and donating it for free under the CC-BY 4.0 license! The illustrations were then to become a part of an open-source, digital repository of magic! Stories and illustrations in languages from around the world, all openly-licensed and available for free.

Yup! You guessed it: StoryWeaver! But back then, it was just a twinkle in the eye of Pratham Books’ ambitious team!

We opened the challenge up to budding, aspirational and professional illustrators above the age of 16 and found 8 hugely talented illustrators (we called them 'Illustrator Gurus') who were more than happy to judge the best entries and also champion the cause by contributing a #6framestory. Winning entries were promised a pairing with published authors who would weave a story around their illustrations! (If you want to read more about the contest, click here.)

We shared a word cloud for the illustrators to use as themes and even wrote 6 simple narratives and shared them online for those illustrators who wanted a ready-made story. 

The response was overwhelming and in a sense, a true indication of the immense potential of community and collaboration! What had started as an experimental campaign soon blossomed into a carnival of art, birthing 450+ new illustrations. From watercolour and digital art, to simple black and white drawings, the entries were hugely diverse.

Archana Sreenivasan, Niloufer Wadia and Jithin Jacob were the three winners of the contest. You can read the stories created with their illustrations here, here and here. Some of these illustrations were used by Pratham Books to create delightful new stories (in English and Hindi) for early readers. 

While we're in the process of uploading all the #6frame artwork to StoryWeaver, we thought it would be wonderful to look back at some of the entries submitted for the contest and share them with our ever-growing community of children, authors, illustrators, translators, parents and educators!

Every Friday, we’ll be sharing an illustration from the #6FrameStoryChallenge. So look for #6FramesFriday on @PBStoryWeaver on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. 

Tell us which ones you love, create stories with them on StoryWeaver, or just lose yourself in their beauty! See you every Friday! We promise to make your weekend fun.

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StoryWeaver is celebrating this festive season by presenting to you our year end wrap. Come, let us soak in this holiday season by reading our most loved stories from 2022. This festive season, let us remember the joys of the year gone by and greet the new year with hope, and renewed enthusiasm. Here is a list of fun and vibrant books for educators and teachers to introduce into the classrooms. 

1. My Little Garden: A little boy and his dad find a plot full of litter. Can they turn it into something wonderful? Go on a journey of transformation and sustainability with the characters from this book written by Bridget Krone, illustrated by Megan Lotter, and published by Book Dash here. 

 

2. The Blob Who Wanted to Be More: Blob always wanted to be more than just a blob, so she set out on an adventure. Along the way, she made new friends, learned new things and came closer to her true self. Read this early reader book and go on an endless adventure of understanding your own identity and the limitless possibilities the world offers you, with the blob, written and illustrated by Rucha Dhayarkar, and published by Singapore Book Council here.

 

3. Once upon a Coin: Banko discovers the beauty of coins when he sees his grandmother’s collection. Join Banko to find out the images that can be spotted on Indian coins. Read this fun story written by Mala Kumar, illustrated by Tanvi Bhat, and published by Pratham Books here.

 

4. The Plant Whisperer: Young Jaishree loves nothing more than plants. She wants to understand them, which is why she decides to spend her life studying plants. Read this biography of ecologist Dr. H Jaishree Subrahmaniam, a story of passion and gumption written by Sayantan Dutta, illustrated by Bhavya Kumar, and published by Pratham Books here.

 

5. Tree’s Company: a play: A wonderful play that includes three stories about three special trees about the importance of plants in our lives. Read this play and discover more about the magic of trees, their stories, and their innate importance in our lives written by Jerry Pinto, illustrated by Kalyani Ganapathy, and published by Pratham Books here.

 

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As we look back, this past year has been about recovering from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic with the realisation that we must continue our efforts to make the joy of reading fun, free, and accessible to all. Help us continue our journey of spreading the cheer of reading. If you like our work, consider supporting us by donating to StoryWeaver. No amount is too small, and we appreciate every single contribution.

To make a contribution, please click: http://bit.ly/3PHTht5

 

 

 

 

 

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