Ramdhan's Flue

So here's a silly story. I drew these illustrations over a year ago for Katha as a part of a publication which compiled short stories written by school kids. The idea of illustrating a story written by a child sounded like so much fun. I wondered how close my drawings be to what the child pictured in his head. What would the child think when he saw my illustrations? Would he like them? What kind of a person would he picture me to be? Would I meet the child someday and talk about the story? It was all very exciting. So when Katha sent in a bunch of stories for me to pick from, I read each one with a lot of interest and finally picked one called Ramdhan's Flute, purely because I was plain impressed by the intellect of the child who'd written it! The choice of words, the pacing of the story, the thought behind the story was all very clever and in my head I was rather honoured to be drawing for this little kid.

All this, only to realise much later that the story had been pulled out of the second edition of the book because someone reported plagiarism. My first set of published illustrations yanked out of the book because the silly little kid copied a story to probably better it's chances of getting published. I want to pinch the child's ear and shove a small scolding into his head. Not because he copied a story. Not because my illustrations didn't get published. But because he didn't write a story of his own.

PS : Notice how the world child is so casually thrown around by someone who's now getting rather comfortable with her twenties. Twenty four to be precise. *Sigh*