Childhood with Chandamama

In the 1960s, I was a high school student in a village. In fact, it was a hamlet on the border where I was living with my family due to my father’s posting there. There was no electricity. We studied at night in the light of kerosene lamps. There were hills and a forest just a kilometre away from our houses. We had no access to any entertainment -- as watching movies -- in the hamlet, except the games we played at our school and at home and storybooks.

My greatest joy was from the reading of storybooks. Though I liked to play games, story-books caught my fancy. I loved reading them. Chandamama, a monthly illustrated children’s magazine, occupied a prominent place in my boyish heart. I look forward to the arrival of Chandamama every month, eagerly with curiosity mounting in my heart. Back then, it was very difficult to find children’s magazines in hamlets like ours. But fortunately, at a small kiosk near a hotel, a few copies of Chandamama were available, and we had no choice but to wait patiently for its arrival.

My father knew our interest and would pay for the magazine in advance to the owner of the store, so the magazine would definitely reach us. As the kiosk was on my way to school, I would go that way every day with my eyes glued to the kiosk from the third week of every month; I frequently asked the owner of the kiosk about the arrival of Chandamama. The day I found the magazine hanging from a long thread along with other newspapers, I could hardly contain my excitement and ran to the kiosk to grab it.

Grasping the Chandamama, laughing all the way, I sprinted home with a glowing countenance. I would sit comfortably on the verandah, thumbing through the pages only to look at the titles of the stories featured. Of course, I would not plunge into reading the stories at once. I savoured the book slowly, relishing the colourful pictures printed on the cover page and inside, at the top of each story. I let my eyes feast over the marvellous, colourful pictures of kings, princes, princesses, Gods, Goddesses, men, and women—illustrated with mastery by the artist, Vaddadi Papayya. I was so enamoured by them that I even tried my hand at drawing those pictures.

The magazine was an eclectic collection of stories from Panchatantra, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Tenali Rama, and Akbar and Birbal. The kings, princes and princesses would flood my heart with infinite happiness. Each story was a joy, and ignited our imaginations.

It was a treasure trove of information about our glorious culture. I wonder if children today enjoy such pleasures as such magazines have vanished to make way for video games and mobile phones. It is indeed a pity if children are deprived of the pleasure of stories.