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Ruskin Bond, the shy literary genius who could be easily credited for making almost three generations of Indian school children into avid readers celebrates his 81st birthday today .
Bond has more than 100 novels to his credit, and has won multiple awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India, the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan.
What makes Bond click amongst children is his stature to generate curiosity beyond the usual syllabus texts. Sure there are tons of other writers in school book texts from the fancy Tolstoy to Woodehouse equally prolific writers, but no one brings the charms of the hills and idiosyncrasies of the North Indian terrain better than Bond. Pitted against the likes of Rudyrad Kipling, Mulk Raj Anand and RK Narayanan, Bond carved a niche for himself mastering the art of supernatural stories set in the Himalayan backdrop.
Bond started displaying his literary talent in England. He wrote his first novel named Room on the Roof when he was all of 17 years. It was a semi-autobiographical story on the life of an orphaned Anglo-Indian boy, reflecting parts of his own life. The book made him win prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize that is awarded to British Commonwealth Writers who are under the age of 30.
Bond always expressed through most of his narratives about his unusual childhood and the trauma attached to it. For him luckily this trauma was channelized very well toward children’s classics, which gave an outlet to his own agonies. Bond found a resemblance somehow with David Copperfield who sustained himself in an unfriendly world. The thought that children are rarely given attention by their elders, made him more sympathetic towards them. The children he came across in villages, their every day experiences suggested themes for his stories.
In his introduction to The Night Train at Deoli and other Stories he writes that in the 1970s, when he was facing all kind of problems, his stories relating to children coped with the difficult situation.
Stories like “My Father’s Trees in Dehra”, The Funeral, When I can’t Climb Anymore, The Tiger in the House, The Playing Fields of Shimla, Coming Home to Dehra, All Creatures Great And Small and The Tree Lover show young Ruskin Bond’s affinity with trees and pets and his love for the town, Dehra.
Unlike many writers who tried too hard, Bond always wrote simple, a quality that made him a literary star beyond just children. His narrative style mostly drawn from his personal experiences engaged the readers and reflected his rich imagination. His writing has the hallmarks of gentle humour and lyric simplicity. His stories, beautifully crafted, speak directly to the reader—as if he is right there, chatting to his audience, rather than spinning a tale on paper.
He always maintained though that given a different genre than his comfort zone, he probably would not be able to do justice. “Ask me to write a piece on petunias and I'll turn out an enthusiastic essay on this underrated flower. But ask me to write the story of a political leader or media tycoon and I'm stumped and stymied. Those little drops of blood threaten to appear," the 80-year-old author, on being awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2014, said.
Having been a best seller and the recipient of several awards, the latest being India’s prestigious Padmashree Award for Literature, Ruskin Bond would be entitled to a sized super-ego, yet he remains engagingly unaffected about his accomplishments leading a simple life amidst the hills of Landour. Even for his birthday he celebrated the day with his "lovely (adopted) family and visitors in the morning," followed by a cake-cutting ceremony at a bookshop in the afternoon.
Awards and achievements
· The Flight of Pigeons has been adapted into the acclaimed Merchant Ivory film Junoon.
· The Room on the Roof has been adapted in to a BBC produced TV series.
· His greatest achievement comes from the fact that several of his short stories from his collections have been incorporated in the school curriculum all over India. It includes jewels such as The Night Train at Deoli, Time Stops at Shamli and Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra.
· He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India for Our Trees Still grows in Dehra in 1992.
· He has also been conferred with Padma Shri, in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan, in 2014
Famous works
The Room on The Roof
Our trees still grow in Dehra
The Night Train at Deoli
Ghost Stories from the Raj
Delhi is Not Far
The Blue Umbrella
Friends in small places
Angry River
Rusty runs away
Hidden Pool
Cherry Tree
A season of Ghosts
