News Room

"Eureka"- August 2006
Fun Conversations about Everyday Science

RUPA PAI

Subtitled 'Fun Conversations about Everyday Science', this is a damn neat series of investigations into all number of things... from why the sky is blue to why things are always falling down and not up! Imagined as a conversation between a bright little boy and his smart elder sister who is forever reading one fat book after another, each story in the series makes the most riveting connections that meld imagination, myth and fact, en route to arriving at the real scientific reason, because hey! Kids say the darndest things! Moreover, the illustrations that draw-out these conversations appear almost intuitive renditions of a child's conjectures, bringing out the fascinating drama and curiosity that fuel the whys and wherefores of children. And, the explanations that come are brilliant and imaginative and in the spirit and wonder of scientific discovery. There is also a basic experiment at the end of each book that lets you test the knowledge you've just gained because, as sister points out, 'I can't say, little brother, I can't say(for sure), But in all the books that I have read/That is what they said'.

In 'Sister, Sister Where Does Thunder Come From?', Little Brother wonders if the all that noise isn't just a big, brutish Kumbhakarna in a royal temper tantrum because he is annoyed that 'silver ropes of rain/lash him, and chase his sleep away'. Or perhaps it is occasioned by a gang of cool bikes: 'When they mount their bikes and KICK them to life/Steel strikes steel/There's your lightening! /then, when they do what bikers do/ Rev up their engines and rrrev them, and rrrev them/There's your thunder!’

In 'Sister, Sister Where Does the Sun Go at Night?', while little brother conjectures that perhaps sunset is when the sun goes to 'flood the underwater with golden light' for the mermaid and shark ball, or may be like their father, is simply tired and goes home, where his wife wraps him in a 'starblanket' and hopes futilely that he doesn't snore this one night! But, counters big sister, the books mention a spinning and rotating and revolution and an aixs... so perhaps the sun doesn't really go anywhere at night!

'Sister, Sister Why Don't Things Fall up?' attempts to explain the mystery and science of gravitational pull, forces of attraction, in an equally quirky way, with examples of toffee wrappers, missing car keys, screws of nosestdus, reprehensible laddoos and other objects, have a knack for alarming and convenient disappearance!

'Sister, Sister Why is the Sky so Blue?' proffers the inimitable, delightful logic that the old woman of the sky spreads out her blue sari to dry, pining them down with cloud-stones so that the naughty wind does not tease it awry, or may be it's because 'one long-ago Holi/The shops ran out of every color BUT blue.../That day an Enormous cloud of blue dust rose/ From laughing blue people everywhere/... And the old woman, the one that lives up there/She scrubs the sky each day/with cloud cottonwool’. And sister tells him differently, of how the books she's read, discuss how each color in the rainbow that makes up the sun's white light, is actually a different wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, and how the color blue runs into bouncer trouble with the gas molecules in the atmosphere that don't allow it thoroughfare... (These books are also available in several Indian languages.)