Books not only help develop a child’s intellect and creativity, but actually shape the mind. Reading helps development of an individual identity and personality…says Priti
Anant Pai aka Uncle Pai ,the father of Indian comics was born in Karkala, in what was the erstwhile Madras Presidency of British India on 17 September 1929 to a Konkani-speaking couple, Venkataraya and Susheela Pai. He lost both his parents at the age of two. He was then brought up by his maternal grandfather. His mission was to bring stories from India’s rich historic past into the mainstream and he was unstoppable.
On the occasion of ‘Uncle Pai Day’! Here’s the excerpt of the Interview taken by taken by Khushboo Agrahari with Preeti Vyas who is the president and CEO of Amar Chitra Katha Private Limited and National Geographic Traveller India. Through her 26-year-long career in the retail, content and publishing industries, she has been a retailer, marketer, publisher, editor, author and entrepreneur. She believes passionately in the power of children’s books to shape the future of India and the world.
It is believed that technology is taking children away from reading? How are children’s book publishers dealing with this challenge?
It is an urban myth that children are not reading any more. The reading habit in fact is growing. Thanks to the effort of educationists, a growing awareness of the importance of reading among young parents and a wide variety of children’s books being available.
When I was a child, we did not have much available in Indian literature. You would either read an Amar Chitra Katha, a Chandamama, some assorted fairy tales, Enid Blyton and the Soviet era books which came our way. But today, we have over fifty Children’s book publishers in India, who are doing amazing contemporary work. It is a very vibrant field. New books are being published every month and schools are really pushing reading as an agenda. So many schools around the country are organizing their own Lit Fests and Book/Literature weeks
Today’s generation of parents are very aware of the importance of reading. They also have a higher disposable income, than our parents did. They have availability and actually the reading habit is growing. Many schools have a dedicated time slot for reading and there are a lot of innovative ways in which children are encouraged to read.
Tell us about your experience working with ACK?
From growing up in a family of bibliophiles to spending a 26 years career surrounded by content, it has truly been an amazing ride. I have had the good fortune of participating in every aspect of a book’s life through the various hats I have donned, as an author, editor, retailer, marketer, licensor, licensee and publisher. The content and publishing space is growing at rapidly in the digital era and I feel like my journey has just started. Getting an opportunity to lead a company and brand that is an indelible part of the childhood of millions of Indians, is one of the biggest blessings of my life. I believe in karma and I am convinced that this role, leading ACK into a new digital age, is the result of good karmas of many past lives.
How do you think Children’s Books shape the future of India and the world?
Books not only help develop a child’s intellect and creativity, but actually shape the mind. Reading helps development of an individual identity and personality. Reading builds awareness, empathy, respect and eventually character. As the famous quote says “Readers are leaders”. If we want the future of the world to be more intelligent, efficient, peaceful, kind, curious, and just, we must encourage the reading habit among children with a fervent passion.
How do book publishers like ACK create content to inculcate Indian values within children minds?
At Amar Chitra Katha, we have been telling stories for over 5 decades, shaping a proud Indian identity and love for our own past, a route to our roots. We take our place in a child’s life as a serious responsibility and realise that parents and educationists are looking at us to provide the right values through our books. We are a route to your roots. That is what our mission is – to provide Indian children a crucial link to their past. Indian children today need, more than ever before, to get to know their own heritage and roots. While it is important that they are confident global citizens, it is equally important for them to own a proud Indian identity. After all, as they say, ‘If you don’t know where you are coming from, how will you know where you are going?’
The challenge is to keep the child who is growing up on content from Disney and Marvel, engaged with Indian content. At Amar Chitra Katha, we see this as the ultimate challenge- to get today’s children to pick up our comic books; not because their parents are buying it for them, but because you find it engaging and you find it fun to read.
How was your pandemic experience as a company and how do you envision Amar Chitra Katha after the pandemic and in the coming years?
Unprecedented.A word that was used to describe 2020-21. The comic book and publishing industry in India were no different. With bookstores remaining closed (in some tragic cases, permanently shutting down) and ecommerce delivering only essentials, the comic book industry and book publishers were forced to innovate. In response to the announcement of schools being shut indefinitely, we announced a campaign offering free access to all our books on the Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle apps. The results were phenomenal. We saw a nearly 300% growth in the number of sign-ups on our app and to our surprise nearly 25% of the new users were from outside India. And not just children, we found adults signing up too. This pace of digital growth we have experienced, will not slow down. Consumers are adapting to a new way of life, post Covid and the business environment will keep on evolving. As storytellers, we are agnostic to the medium. We are happy regardless of the medium readers choose to read our content whether it is physically, digitally or listen to them through podcasts or watch an animated version of the story. Pandemic or prosperity, environment notwithstanding, publishing comics is what we do best and what we hope to keep doing as long as human civilization survives.
As we move forward in a post Covid world, I look at this period with gratitude that our comic books and company not just survived the pandemic, but thrived and brought succour and joy to lakhs of Indian readers across the world.
The name of Uncle Pai is synonymous with Indian comics and Amar Chitra Katha. How is the current team at ACK taking his amazing legacy forward?
Uncle Pai was a genius. Every generation has a few iconic trailblazers who define that era and our founder was definitely one of them. The impact of Uncle Pai’s work on helping a whole generation of Indians take pride in their own stories is priceless. We continue to tell new stories with the same ethos as Uncle. The pace of creation of new content is faster than ever before in the history of our company. As we celebrate Uncle Pai’s 93rd birth anniversary we stand at the threshold of perhaps the most exciting phase of our company’s history. An era where tiny book shops still sell our comics month after month, hundreds of Tinkle readers write in to us every week, ecommerce retailers ensure over a million copies of our books reach every pin code of India every single day, and our digital platforms witness over a million pages of our comics read every single week!
A vibrant era in which we will harness every possible technological innovation to make our content accessible to new forms of content consumption. An era when we will dig through all possible archives, go to every corner of India to unearth stories of our past and of inspiring Indians that are yet to be told. Uncle Pai’s vision and purpose coupled with the national treasure, which is our portfolio, continue to guide us every single day.