Animals – Bijal Vachharajani

http://www.mid-day.com/articles/book-review-dead-as-a-dodo/16424177
Book review: Dead as a Dodo

By Bijal Vachharajani |Posted 04-Aug-2015

When it comes to being extinct, the first name that leaps to one’s mind is the Mauritian flightless dodo. After all, the dodo bird went extinct in the late 1600s and even has a famous morbid phrase dubbed after it. But in Venita Coelho’s Dead as a Dodo, the extinct bird gets a new lease of life. After Coelho’s first book, Tiger by the Tail, Agent No 11.5 Rana makes a comeback, along with Agent No 002, Bagha the brave tiger; and Agent No 13, Kela, the mischievous and always-in-trouble grey langur. Rana has a special gift — he can use ‘JungleSpeak’ to communicate to animals, and for this skill, he’s part of the Animal Intelligence Agency.

Dead as a Dodo

This time around, the three protagonists are on Mission: Dead as a Dodo. While on the heels of a missing hangul deer, the trio stumble upon an extinction operation, where a shadowy villain is hell bent on stealing the last specimens of highly endangered species. Now, this villain has managed to lay his hands on an actual live dodo aka the Raphus cucullatus. Their adventure takes Rana, Bagha and Kela from Delhi to Mauritius to North America, in a quest to save the most endangered of species.

Coelho spins a real tale about conservation and international wildlife trafficking, while managing to keep the reader chuckling and guessing right until the very end. Her characters are spunky and the narrative is a lovely way of introducing children to different aspects of natural history.

William Hartston wrote in his book, The Things that Nobody Knows: 501 Mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything, about the coelacanth, a fish that was believed to be extinct for 65 million years ago, but was caught in 1938, by fishermen off the coast of South Africa. Unfortunately, Hartston adds that the chances of the dodo being alive are only three in a million. As the earth enters into its sixth extension phase — a recent report revealed that “vertebrates were vanishing at a rate 114 times faster than normal” — Dead as a Dodo takes on a special significance. As Coelho points out in her book, it’s in our hands to ensure that today’s endangered species, like the hangul deer, don’t go the way of the dodo.

Dead as a Dodo, Venita Coelho, Hachette India, Rs 350. Available at leading bookstores and e-stores

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Hand-drawn beasts are the star of a new book series about life in India, finds Bijal Vachharajani.

When cartoonist Ananth Shankar looks at people, he sees them not as bipeds; but as animals. When I met him (and co-author Nidhi Jaipuria) to talk about their latest book, The CrazyDesi Book!, he pronounced that I looked like a Sarus Crane to him and proceeded to describe the characteristics I shared with the bird. Then he asked me to draw a squiggle on a blank page, and the S-shaped line was turned into an elephant, sloth bear, owl and tiger, in just a few minutes. Shankar is nothing if not prolific. And this is evident in the book, a series of animal cartoons that are focused on the theme of travel.

Planned as a series, the first volume is rendered in black-andwhite by Shankar and written by Jaipuria. “Each CrazyDesi Book! is a take on a typical Indian slice of life looked at by the most unique animal characters that come alive as ‘Man’imals!” A range of characters – ‘Cow’alli, ‘Cat’reena, Yo!bra, Ratappa, ‘Woof’adar Bhai, Durga Murga, Goa‘tee’, KA Raddy and ‘Ullu’da – navigate the perilous Indian roads to narrate stereotypical travel anecdotes. The cartoon book is presented in an alphabetic manner, with each letter attributed to a word. For instance, N stands for “Naturalist”, and it talks about how “the naturalists [are] ‘pee’s-fully working at keeping our highways green!” And this is accompanied by an image of a car parked on the highway and four “naturalists” peeing on the green patches.

Each page presents questions such as environment degradation and social conduct and takes a gentle dig at some of the typical behaviour of Indian tourists. “It’s a velvet glove within an iron fist,” said Jaipuria, who has been an English teacher with Mallya Aditi International School in Bangalore for a decade, and now conducts a range of workshops for children. “The series uses an unusual style of cartoons and wit to present India back to Indians.”In many ways the book manages to do that, but we could do without the many quotation marks that are used to emphasise the obvious puns in the text, which only serves to distract from the narrative.

Shankar and Jaipuria said that the book grew out of their daily banter, which usually revolves around puns. In the book, Shankar dubs himself as Draw Dog, Jaipuria is Word Bird and the book designer Vivek Krishnappa is called Tool Toad. Travel is the first in a series for The CrazyDesi Book! Next, the authors are working on the theme of shopping.

The CrazyDesi Book, WagsintheBags, Rs1,000 for a limited-edition Collector’s Pack (set of four). Rs300 for each book. Visit wagsinthebags.comfor details.

http://www.timeoutbengaluru.net/books/features/purr-desi