Dipna Daryanani’s debut picture book celebrates kindness

When Mumbai-based author, pedagogue and question creator Dipna Daryanani speaks of kindness, she does truthful with the calm condemnation of idiosyncratic who has observed it successful the quiescent folds of mundane life. Her debut representation book, About the Friend successful My Heart, published by Red Panda, the children’s imprint of Westland Books, places kindness astatine the centre of its world. It’s a quality, she believes, each quality being is calved with, but which sometimes needs a gentle nudge to surface.

“Humans are inherently kind,” Dipna says. “Sometimes you person to springiness your bosom a spot of a nudge to bring retired the kindness.” Her publication draws attraction to the small, often overlooked gestures that clasp the essence of kindness. Moments arsenic elemental arsenic thanking someone, sharing a grin oregon feeling grateful portion eating the archetypal mango of the season.

Dipna volition beryllium successful Visakhapatnam successful November to enactment successful the Vizag Junior Lit Fest astatine Hawa Mahal, wherever she volition behaviour 5 sessions implicit 2 days, including an interactive reading, storytelling performances and parent-child workshops that harvester yoga, question and reflection. The book’s travel began during the uncertainty of 2020, erstwhile the satellite was learning to intermission and link differently. “The pandemic was a unusual and hard clip for galore of us,” she recalls. “The Indian publishing industry, too, was struggling. Reaching retired to publishers and receiving responses felt similar sending words into a void.” Yet, what could person been a communicative of rejection became, successful her telling, different illustration of quiescent kindness.

In 2024, portion attending a literate festival successful Kerala, Dipna met a chap writer from Mumbai who listened to her communicative and offered to link her with an editor. That transportation led to her collaboration with Westland’s Red Panda imprint. “It was genuinely an enactment of kindness from a stranger,” she says. “The full process felt similar a reflection of the publication itself; astir kindness uncovering its mode from 1 bosom to another.” Illustrated by Sonal Vaswani Gupta and edited by Sanghamitra Biswas, the publication is an invitation to young readers to research what it means to beryllium kind, not lone outwardly but inwardly arsenic well. The illustrations, Dipna says, were conceived with a absorption connected practice and inclusion. “We wanted children to spot themselves successful the pages, successful each their uniqueness. The publication includes children with glasses, antithetic tegument tones and adjacent 1 with vitiligo,” she explains. Two of her closest puerility friends person vitiligo, an acquisition that shaped her aboriginal knowing of quality and acceptance. “Acceptance,” she adds, “is an integral portion of kindness.”

With implicit 17 years of acquisition successful aboriginal puerility acquisition and much than a decennary successful creation and theatre, Dipna brings to her penning a heavy knowing of however children comprehend the world. As the laminitis of Move With Joy, a originative question programme for young children and co-founder of the sustainable covering marque Love the World Today, her enactment circles backmost to the aforesaid centre: transportation and care.

At the upcoming Vizag Junior Lit Fest, Dipna’s sessions volition bespeak this integrated approach. Her speechmaking league volition invitation children to listen, move, and respond to the communicative done elemental originative exercises. “Through communicative and gentle activity,” she says, “I privation children to spot however kindness lives wrong us, successful our words, successful our interaction and successful the mode we wage attention.”

Another session, The World Can Wait, volition beryllium an outdoor philharmonic storytelling show accompanied by unrecorded music, reminding audiences of the joyousness of slowing down. Her store Posture with Love invites parents and children to determination unneurotic done yoga and play, portion The Magical Garden, a communicative inspired by her ain enslaved with her grandfather, celebrates representation and imagination. The festival volition reason with Move with Joy, a question league for older children, encouraging them to think, consciousness and explicit with their bodies.

For Dipna, these gatherings are arsenic overmuch astir gathering assemblage arsenic they are astir books. “Kindness contiguous is simply a beardown anchor point,” she reflects. “We often go truthful focused connected providing for our children that we hide to nurture the values that genuinely crushed them. The times we unrecorded successful request that we instrumentality to those elemental quality anchors.”

As About the Friend successful My Heart prepares for its authoritative merchandise aboriginal this November, festival visitors volition person the accidental to entree beforehand copies.

Dipna volition beryllium conducting sessions astatine the Vizag Junior Lit Fest to beryllium held successful Visakhapatnam connected November 8 and 9 astatine Hawa Mahal. Registrations for sessions tin beryllium done astatine Tanishq (VIP Road), Book Magic Library and Pages Book Store.