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A potful of fantasy
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Finding a child who is not part of the Pottermania is quite a task. What is it about Harry Potter that appeals to the younger generation, which it does not find in an Amar Chitra 0Katha comic?
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Harry Potter fans count down to the opening of the latest book
I SPENT two whole days, a fortnight ago, deeply engaged in tracking down some child, any child, who was not a fan of Harry Potter. A journalist had sent out a desperate SOS after his editor ordered him and his colleagues to launch a nationwide search, and I, who am empathetic to all victims of cussed editors, immediately offered to help. Since I was not equipped with a Nimbus 2000, I armed myself for the hunt with the only tool I had at hand: the telephone.
The enormity of the assignment may not strike you unless you see it laid out in cold print. Task: Find child. Child must have reading habit. Child must be reader of storybooks in English. Child must be averse to, or disillusioned with, or uninterested in J.K. Rowling. Child must give cogent reasons for the same while agreeing to be quoted and photographed. And all this, mind you, in a week when copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are flying off the shelves into thousands of eager little hands like a game of Quidditch in slow motion.
Every little person I spoke to gave me the same answer. When I asked a 10-year-old if she could help me find someone who didn't like Potter, she breathed: "But that's impossible!" I had hoped that fans might lead me to foes, but apparently, fans only knew of other fans. "Try looking in Chitradurga or Melkote," said one parent with wicked glee. Another, even as he spoke to me, had a copy of Phoenix in his hand for he was as ardent a fan as his daughter. I buttonholed the president of our apartment owners' association and urged him to call me the moment he found a likely candidate. "Very doubtful," he said doubtfully.
The journalist in question had meanwhile followed up a lead I had given him and dialled a school librarian. She brought a 10th standard student to the phone. The boy critiqued Rowling's works in a few crisp sentences but the moment he was asked to reveal his identity he scooted! After much button pushing, I managed to locate a small boy who had not fallen prey to Pottermania although he read avidly and widely. But you could hardly categorise him as a foe. He said that although he had been intimidated by the size of Phoenix, if someone lent it to him he wouldn't mind trying it out. That sounded more like a prospective fan speaking.
My armchair expedition left me with mixed feelings. It was with some satisfaction that I noted, a few days later, that the cussed editor had had to admit defeat and publish a feature slanted heavily in Potter's favour. At the same time, I couldn't help sympathising with a parent who worried that kids like hers had succumbed to peer pressure and considered ownership of the latest Potter a status symbol. And yet, isn't the thrill of heading a queue to buy a coveted book pretty much the same as that of a moviegoer grabbing a ticket for "first day first show"? I guess the key question is, does your child love Harry for his own sake or because the woman who invented him is richer than the Queen of England?
I don't know how easy it is for a child to separate Rowling's popularity from her success — in other words, to distinguish between her talent and her bank balance. If thousands of adults clamoured to watch Devdas primarily because it was the most expensive film made in India, there's no reason why children shouldn't be caught in the money whirl. The fastest selling book in history need not be the best book ever written, but an orchestrated global marketing strategy that includes media hype and sale of merchandise can convince you otherwise.
Since the Rowling snowball has been gaining momentum with every book, one can expect numbers six and seven in the series to be monstrous hits. But her success does not detract from her intrinsic appeal. "Maybe she's the Enid Blyton of this generation," remarked a mother of two. Enid Blyton — how quaint she seems in comparison, with her Five Findouters detecting crime, wearing disguises, getting locked up in attics, and eating buns and éclairs. We outgrew Blyton in our teens, just as we outgrew fairytales when we turned six or seven. The fiction we read as children prepared us in stages for the adult world. Strange that today's children want to remain under the spell of Rowling's parallel universe for as long as they can, immersing themselves in fantasyland.
We had magic in our mythology, but the oral legacy petered out with the previous generation and I'd be very surprised to find today's young parents narrating rambling episodes from the epics to their children. You hear them speaking to their toddlers in English so they can get a head start in kindergarten. The Amar Chitra Katha, which is nothing but ajji's tales in an edited package, isn't as popular as it used to be. The English cartoon version of Tenali Raman on TV is about as Indian as The Power Puff Girls.
Perhaps the mounting number of English-speaking, cable-watching, urban children find it easy to relate to Harry Potter's culturally amorphous universe.
C.K. MEENA
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