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This children's storybook based on flamingos conveys an environmental message
Updated On: 30 May, 2025 09:15 AM IST | Mumbai | Fiona Fernandez
A new thought-provoking storybook for children with flamingos as the under-threat protagonists, is a seamless jugalbandi of words, environmental messaging and visual art
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Illustrator Kuriyan believes a strange mixture of fun and a foreboding sense of something not being right, works for the book. ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY/PRIYA KURIYAN, TULIKA BOOKS
When the Bandra-Worli Sea Link was under construction, I wondered how the flamingos — who migrate to Sewri each year — would survive the mess the construction wrought. The frames I imagined stayed with me. And now we’re repeating the same horrors with the Coastal Road, Mumbai’s new sea links, and the endless other such horrific, blindly approved ‘development’ projects,” rues Devashish Makhija, author of the just-released Go Go Flamingo (Tulika Books), a children’s book where a flamboyance of flamingos flying into Mumbai offer an honest take on the impact of development on its already-threatened environment.
The flamingos are representative of all nature — it is at first bewildered, then curious, then horrified, and finally, destroyed by man’s endless appetite for destruction,” he elaborates. The author, who is an award-winning film director, was clear about the subject but also aware that nudging his target audience to read it was going to be a challenge. “To make the [young] reader relate to the flamingos, and their eventual quandary, I humanised and personalised them. Because we [humans] have an innate primitive mechanism for our survival that won’t easily allow us to empathise with the other. To make the reader feel for the other, I thought of giving the flamingos human traits.” We loved this representation in the flamingos’ names, courtesy Makhija’s ability to seamlessly blend quirk with a critical topic.
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