Tag: Festivals in the Jungle

Diwali in the Jungle: By B.S.Bumble

Diwali in the Jungle – By B.S.Bumble

California announced that Diwali is a holiday. I am pleased that this is the year I published the fifth book in my Festivals in the Jungle Series – titled Diwali in the Jungle. It feels beautiful to celebrate the Festival of Lights in such a wonderful manner. 

The fifth book has had its time coming. Partly due to life’s pressures, and partly due to the fact that my own children, nephews and nieces were past the age of reading children’s books. 

I started writing the series for them more than a decade ago. I had just got off a video call with the daughter talking to her charming little cousin in India, who’d asked her, “What’s Halloween?” To which the daughter explained with all the elder sister energy and confidence of a seven year old she could muster. “It is when you can be anything. My brother is going to be a monkey (Curious George), and I am going to be a fairy (Tinker Bell)!” 

Bless children, really! This statement might’ve confused her cousin, but she was more than willing to go with the premise. Not stopping to ask why her baby cousin-brother would become a monkey or why her cousin-sister would become a fairy. She just asked if she could become a fairy too.

The first book I wrote was Halloween in the Jungle, though I published Christmas in the Jungle first. 

Diwali in the Jungle

The characters in the books (Janny Rat, Oby Elephant, Zebo Zebra and Tango Tiger etc) however, continued celebrating different festivals in the jungle. Every year, I would read to my children’s elementary school classmates, and get reviews from them real-time (Alas! they did not get to record their ratings and reviews, but I remember them all fondly.) The animals celebrated Halloween, Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, and Mother’s Day. So why not have them celebrate Diwali too? After all, California is now officially celebrating Diwali!

So please read on to find out. The book is available for free download in iBooks titled, ‘Diwali in the Jungle’.

What happens when the animals try to celebrate Diwali in the Jungle? The animals make bright rangoli patterns, light diyas, and share a delicious feast. But when a plan to startle Tango Tiger gets a little too noisy, everyone remembers what the festival is really about—light, friendship, and compassion. A joyful read-aloud that introduces young readers to Diwali traditions.

Illustrations 

The previous books in the series were illustrated using digital imaging techniques. A decade has since passed. When AI imaging emerged, the itch to bring these characters back to life was there. So, I started with the simple story, and numerous attempts to generate the illustrations. 

It took several attempts, several different styles, and several mistakes before something emerged. The problem is that AI has no idea that a bison has 4 legs. When illustrating a children’s book in which the Bison is attempting to shake pepper, it will give the Bison two hands as well as four legs. Want to get an elephant to sprinkle sugar? Just use another trunk! 

That, right there, is both the limitation and amusement of using AI techniques. It genuinely has no clue what is commonplace, what is ludicrous, and what is downright wrong. You tell the prompt that you want the image generated again and say, “Make sure the elephant has one trunk only.”, and it responds, extremely politely, “You are absolutely correct. An elephant has one trunk only. I will correct it and generate another image for you.” 

And then go ahead to generate an image with the elephant having 2 trunks, and 4 legs and 2 hands for the next 15 attempts. Frustrating? Yes. Funny? Yes. Time-consuming? Yes. Worth it? I hope so. 

After literally days and days of generating images with several different prompts, styles, and character looks, I settled on the images used in this book. I hope it works for the story. There is a certain continuity in how the animals look across the different books, though published a decade apart.

What’s Next?

The animals still have a lot of festivals to celebrate in the jungle, don’t they? Maybe they will celebrate Father’s Day in the Jungle next. It was a book conceptualized years ago with a story involving hiking, star-gazing and more.

All the books are for children aged 4-8 years. The books all have an audio component to them – they are read-along books. Hence the iBooks format, and not Kindle. The first few books were read out aloud by the daughter, one of them had music generated in the background by my talented friend, the husband looked up technological options, and the son wanted to put them out on YouTube. 

In short, every book was a celebration in our household. 

I hope your young ones enjoy the stories as much as my family and friends did putting it out for them. The books are all dedicated to everyone who tries to find joy and happiness in our daily lives.

Celebrate World Elephant Day: Protecting Our Gentle Giants

World Elephant Day

August 12th, is World Elephant Day. Seeing elephants (even the cute AI generated pictures) makes me smile. The huge, gentle, loving, empathetic, loyal, family and community oriented animals have always captured the human spirit. It is the reason one of the most popular gods of Hinduism features an elephant-headed god. His birthday is celebrated with so much pomp and splendor, I am sure the elephants wonder what the fuss is all about on those days. 

I am not sure if they’ve heard how much their stories resonate with human-beings – Water for Elephants or Rosy is my Relative for instance. Even my own modest attempt, Mother’s Day in the Jungle, was such a joy to write. Oby Elephant and his pals are all that we want our children to be. 

https://books.apple.com/us/book/mothers-day-in-the-jungle/id874603773
Mother’s Day in the Jungle

It is no wonder that elephant related documentaries are always a hit. We want to see them succeed, we want to know that peaceful living can take us far. 

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

– – David Attenborough

Temporal Range of Elephants 

In the essay, Temporal Range, in the collection of essays by John Green, The Anthropocene, he talks about how long these majestic creatures have been a recognized species – 2.5 million years as opposed to humans who were only classified as such for the last 250,000 years. Yet in that short time, we have endangered almost every other notable species on the planet in small and big ways. 

Dolphins have been here for 10-11 million years – with their songs of wisdom, playful natures, and community based raising of their pods. Dolphin grandmas are delightful, and critical in the raising of their young. The same way the matriarch of the elephant herd is instrumental in passing on skills to the younger generation of pachyderms. Humans have somehow managed to emulate and disregard this ancient piece of wisdom by denying women freedom and basic rights, but also making them critical to the caring of the family unit. Sigh.

When we talk about accumulated wisdom,  most of the philosophy we have at our disposal caps out at 5000 years. But, elephants and dolphins? Please. They have figured out how to live out their lives cancer-free. 

Unpacking 🐘🐘🐘, 🐬🐬🐬 & 🐦🦚🐧🕊️

A friend of mine shared this article, Face it! You’re a crazy person, on unpacking the life of someone’s job. As I read what it meant (trying to visualize every Tuesday afternoon for the next few years, the day-in-the-life-of series), I found myself thinking that I would love to unpack being an elephant in the wild, a dolphin in the oceans, or a bird in the gardens before deciding whether to remain a human-being.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

What are some things related to elephants you’d like to share? Anything.

Happy World Elephant Day!

The Happy Cluckers Are Named

I pinned the Volunteer badge proudly to my chest and walked into the son’s classroom. There, on the board, was a list. The teacher was busy adding to the list and I was flummoxed. There was no categorization. I mean this was not a grocery list, not an author list, not a mailing list, it didn’t look like ice cream flavors either. This list had no theme. 

A sample:

  • Caramel
  • King Cluck III
  • Nathan Drake
  • Westerpoolch
  • McFlurry
  • Lee

I must’ve looked quizzical, for the moment the teacher saw me, she said somewhat sheepishly. “Well, we are coming with a list of names for the chicks in Science class. Say what you will about my job, it is never dull!”

I laughed agreeing heartily. The son had told me about the chicks they were raising in Science class. I just hadn’t realized all the background work that went into raising them.

I have the greatest admiration for teachers as regular readers know: their job is the hardest (but also the most gratifying as the father likes to remind me. He was a teacher for 40 years and is still happy to teach when he can.)

Once the class had settled down, I set about reading a story I had written : Father’s Day in the Jungle, followed by an article published in The Hindu newspaper: Space Racers – Together the Fun Begins, and the saying on the Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan.

The picture of Earth Rising

The children were a marvelous audience as usual. They were curious, wanted to know about how we got the images of our planet, and how it came to be called the Pale Blue Dot. There is always a moment of awe as I imagine the Voyager II spacecraft turning around just before exiting the solar system to take that picture of Earth – the picture immortalized in Carl Sagan’s words as the Pale Blue Dot. I hope a little of that awe was captured by the children in class that day.  

Pale Blue Dot – Carl Sagan

The innocence, intelligence and joy in an elementary school classroom was more keenly acute this time so close on the heels of another meaningless gun shooting incident in America. 

I am always grateful to the children’s teachers who allow me to come and read to the children, for the experience is extremely satisfying, and the energy of the young children is like a tonic of sorts.

That evening, I asked the son whether the chicks had names yet, and he said happily. “Yeah! The voting was intense. But Caramel and Westerpoolch are happy cluck-ers ma!”

I was reminded of Miss Read’s sayings: Miss Read was a country school teacher who wrote prolific books about life in the English countryside with generous measures of common sense, nature, and gentle humor.

“Life went on. No matter what happened, life went on, inexorably, callously, it might seem, to those in grief. But somehow, in this continuity, there were the seeds of comfort.” 

Miss Read, Emily Davis