Child protection is every citizen's moral responsibility, says actress-turned-author Nandana Sen

She's a Harvard grad who trained in acting and is now a children's author. One of Nandana Sen's passionate causes has been child rights and she has spoken about it extensively across the globe. In an exclusive interview with dna, Nandana Sen talks about how she started writing children's books, her latest Mambi book series, child rights and the intolerance debate in India.

From movies to writing books. How did this happen?

It was actually the other way round. I was addicted to books way before I discovered movies. Most precociously, I started writing my first book when I was 10 - my mother still has that manuscript. Funny thing is, when I moved to Bombay to shoot Black, everyone's first reaction was: what’s a Harvard literature graduate doing in Hindi films? (As if there's an ideological clash between the two.) Now that I have a body of work as an actor, the confusion happens in reverse: why on earth is an actress wasting time writing books? (laughing) I’m sure growing up in a family of writers had something to do with being such an incurable bibliophile, and being a literature editor at Houghton Mifflin only intensified this obsession.

Why a children's books in particular?

I absolutely love writing for kids. I believe in the transformative power of children’s books as deeply as I believe in the wide influence of cinema. And when you write for children, you have the privilege of using fantasy to make reality more vivid for kids - the larger reality they live in, a reality from which privileged children are at times quite disconnected. So, many of the stories I’d like to tell grew, in some way or the other, out of my work in child protection - they germinated and came together over the years, as I worked with kids. I do love it - in the last few weeks I’ve held 15 odd raucous sessions in multiple cities with hundreds of excited kids, whether in schools, bookstores, lit fests, national parks, or community centres. For me, this kind of interactive storytelling is the most fun part about being a children’s author.

Nandana at a story-telling session with kids

Do you find inspiration for your stories from kids themselves?

Absolutely. Whether it’s the kids that I work with, or the seven marvellous nephews and nieces I’m lucky to have, children always bring such wonder and imagination into our lives – it’s a blessing to be able to see the world with that kind of clarity and innocence. All children, no matter their background, have a rich world of fantasy, whether or not they can read or own any books. In fact, children who come from difficult circumstances often rely even more heavily on their imagination, to cope.

Tell us a little about Mambi And The Forest Fire.

This first book of the Mambi series is about self-confidence, courage, and empathy; the next books will explore, in fun and engaging ways, topics such as learning to share, respecting diversity, and helping others in need. In Mambi and the Forest Fire, I chose to focus on learning to accept yourself (while respecting peers who are different), because children today have to face many intense pressures, in school and also at home. And popular culture often adds to the anxiety of kids as well as adults, by showering unrealistic aspirational images – be cuter, smarter, richer, thinner, fairer, have trendier clothes, a glossier family car and so on. It’s important to make a child understand that he may have different strengths and abilities than his peers - he may be dyslexic and read slowly but do arithmetic super fast, or she may like boxing and robots more than princesses and fairy-dust - and that’s absolutely okay. With the best of intentions, parents can bombard us with their dreams of who they want us to be, even if that’s not who we are. For example, it’s heartbreaking how often we read of young students driven to suicide by performance anxiety. We need to encourage children from an early age to fully embrace who they are even if they are "different", and to discover their own unique voice.  That’s what 'Mambi' is about.

Where does India stand with regards to child rights? What more do we need to do?

To truly take care of India’s children, we have many dire problems to solve in multiple areas, including nutrition, education, healthcare, sanitation, safety, ending child labour and trafficking, minimising infant mortality, balancing the gender ratio, ending child sexual abuse, eradicating child marriage… and the list continues. But an equally overwhelming problem is our attitude, as a nation: how easily we deny, neglect, or condone the prevalence of every kind of child abuse in India. It is deeply disturbing that as a population, our instinct is to distance ourselves from the child on the street, the child working hazardously, the child who has been raped, the child who has been sold.  As if he/she belongs to an alien universe – that doesn’t affect my life so it's not my problem. The first thing we need to do is recognise that it does affect our life, that every child is our problem. The children of India are who the nation will be, and child protection is every citizen's moral responsibility.

Intolerance has been highly debated in India recently. What are your views?

To begin with, I find it strange that any acknowledgment of the existence of “intolerance” in India is now identified primarily as the view of the “liberal” intelligentsia (and, according to some, as “anti-national” or “unpatriotic”). Traversing through multiple literary festivals recently, I couldn’t help notice the dexterity with which panelists (including myself) adopted a range of alternative vocabulary to discuss this now controversial concept – using terms like “over-sensitivity,” “a culture of conformity” or “un-freedoms”.  We treat the word “intolerance” like it’s the new smut on the block, like a tyrannical neologism, even though we can’t deny that there have been, and continue to be, many intolerances in India. Not only religious and caste-based intolerance, but intolerance of women’s equality, of the rights of children, of student demonstrations, of dalits and marginalised communities, of homosexuality – and the list continues.

Therefore, I find it baffling that this word “intolerance”, which denotes a lapse from the most universal, humanist principle of equal respect for all, has now become a keyword for decoding political allegiances. Yes, there have been many intolerances in the past – from Gujarat to Assam, from the Sikh riots to the violence against Kashmiri Pandits - but because there was grave injustice in the past, should we now condone injustices in the present? Or, worse, consider them to somehow be justified? To give just a few examples from the last six months (there are many more), we can’t deny that recent incidents like the murder of MM Kalburgi, the lynching of Mohammad Aklaq in Dadri, the gang rapes (and their subsequent denial) during the Jat riots, the death of Rohith Vemula, or the repeated assaults on JNU students are deeply disturbing. If we ignore these facts, we are choosing either to be blind, or to be mute – a far more disquieting choice than the one between the left and the right.