Student's Corner: How the Bhagwad Gita can be a bestseller for children
‘Student’s Corner’ will be an ongoing series on The Chakkar, where we’ll feature essays and other contributions by school students from different parts of India. Reach out to us if you wish to submit your work
The Gita: For Children - How the mythological verse can be re-understood for young people in modern times.
A few days ago, I walked into my school’s library, eager to find a book worth reading. I found The Gita: For Children by Roopa Pai, the very first page of which read:
“You have often wondered why so many people get all the solemn, dewy-eyed and worshipful about a book that looked like the most difficult to read?”
Ah! How relatable it seems, doesn’t it? And this is what compels me today to discuss why books like The Gita can’t be fit for children. Of course, they can - if they are well-knitted with words for nurturing the young minds.
Well, this book by Pai itself is an effort to present The Bhagwad Gita in front of young adults to keep them tangled with the roots of their mythology, as well as the spiritual threads that weave the fabric of our minds and hearts, the strong morals that strengthen the existence of diverse and varied cultures in our country, and the interaction of the self with the almighty.
In her book, Pai mentions that the old stories that still get told, read and discussed thousands of years after they were first written, are far more than just ‘stories’. They contain within them hidden truths, morals, and wisdom that we can all learn from. The Gita is one of the greatest conversations in the world: what Krishna tells Arjuna is really a message he is sending out to all of us on how to live our lives in the most honest and the best possible way.
Each day, like Arjuna on the battlefield, we have to fight the battles between our mind and heart. We have to choose between what is right and what is wrong. The Krishna inside us appears as the small voice of conscience, telling us the right path to follow.
Everyone of my age group has heard of The Gita, and perfunctorily knows what it is all about. But what prompts me to write this article is the astonishment of the fact that how can these seven hundred shlokas contained in Pai’s Gita be explained with the help of few modern lessons. How does The Gita talk about the law of conservation of energy? How can Harry Potter (or J.K. Rowling) help us get through The Gita’s lessons? Does Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird focus on both racism in the USA and relate to the ‘Kurukshetra’ of our daily lives?
The way the lessons of The Gita have been put before the eyes of the readers Pai is something that makes it worth reading again and again!
As The Gita says:
“Karmanye vaadhi karastey maa phaleshu kadaachana
Maa karma phal hetur bhoorma tey sango stva karmani”
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Ishita Praveen is a student of Class XI-L from Sunbeam School (Bhagwanpur) in Varanasi.
