Words are Weariness

My niece wanted me to write/translate a story for her 4-year old daughter; the little one whose voracious appetite for reading and stories should be daunting for her mother. Immediately I remembered one of the Russian tales of Arkady Gaidar whose story of ‘Chuck and Geck’ I had read some 40+ years back in Tamil. Those days, the soviet communist propaganda was allowed free reign in India under the Indo-Soviet co-operation, Our CPI cadres were running a publishing house ( I think the name was NCBH)   where they printed translations of Russian publications from Progress Publishers or Mir Publishers, Moscow.   While a good deal of them were pure propaganda with titles like “How Socialism settled the question of sub-nationalism in USSR” ( the fact was that they only exacerbated and never settled them)   or “Scientific Socialism – Empirical criticism” , there were also excellent children’s literature in the form of folk tales and songs all rendered in highly readable Tamil.   They were als