Bond ing with Ruskin!

The gift of storytelling is one of life's most powerful and envied skills. A story well told can make us laugh, weep, swell with pride, or rise with indignation. Storytelling entails ways to make a child curious and encourages them to ask questions because this makes the child think. They learn to associate images in the book with the story and this develops their visualising capacity and imagination.

Landmark, a Tata-owned company, came up with an initiative in 2014 -‘child reading to child’- to promote this visualising skill. Under this method, a child is selected through auditions from every city and five final winners get to meet celebrated children’s book author Ruskin Bond and to inculcate the art of storytelling from the master himself.

Landmark’s storytelling competition was conducted for children between the ages of 8 to 14 by Scholastic Children’s publishing house and more than 100 city children participated. There were 6 titles from Puffin books for the activity. Participating kids selected one of the titles from which they read out a story on the activity day, to other children.

This year, Mohammed Ali, an eighth standard student from St Patrick’s High School has won the book reading competition from Hyderabad and won an opportunity to meet Ruskin Bond. Expressing his excitement, Ali said, “It was a great feeling to meet Ruskin Bond; I felt happy and honoured.

He is a very inspiring person, so much grounded & humble despite being a great writer” Mohammed Ali’s fetish for reading began when he was 4 years old and there’s been no looking back ever since. In this spare time, he enjoys watching cartoon shows, animated movies and reading fantasy novels. The thrill of meeting the legendary author Ruskin Bond hasn’t sunk in yet and is a dream come true for Mohammed.

By:Vaishnavi Girish