Of Flips, Flaps and Soaring High

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He was there almost every morning, perched on top of the roof adjacent to my kitchen’s window, during the year I lived in the United Kingdom. My friend hated him and even his entire clan. She called them cunning, notorious thieves. She was indeed right. They were the best in stealing food. Yet I took a special liking towards him because he reminded me of someone I had known from a book. A beautiful handwritten note on the cover page of the book says “A journey towards a dream is always an enchanting experience. So here is a book for you, to be a companion in all the endeavors of your life”. Continue reading “Of Flips, Flaps and Soaring High” →

A Nostalgic Trip to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

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It was one of those sultry afternoons in school and my English teacher nonchalantly went on about a poem. I do not have the faintest memory of the poem that was being taught or my teacher who was teaching it. I do not even remember who the poet was or anything else about the day except that I was introduced to Topsy. The poet mentioned in his poem that ‘the grasses grew like Topsy’ and I learned that Topsy was an orphaned slave girl who thought she just grow’d and nobody ever made her. And hence the phrase – “grow like Topsy”. I was probably a year or two older than her then and she intrigued me. In my quest to learn more about her, I found myself in the company of the Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Collins Classics), borrowed from the school library that evening. I had only wanted to know what happened of Topsy, but then Ms. Stowe had more than just one story to tell me that evening. Continue reading “A Nostalgic Trip to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” →