Vandu Mama’s Bale Balu in English: Balu the Bully

Hi folks,

Apologies! Apologies ! Apologies and more of that. (is there a free soul kind enough to copy this and paste it for 1, 67, 000 crore times for me to make it up for all the delay and disappearance from the blogosphere? If so, let me know). I was almost non existent in this part of the world and with my designing work blossoming to a new level with lots of “Happening” things actually happening, am kind of allowed to disappear.

now, i was reading my regular dose of blogs and suddenly i read THIS post from Viswa and thought of breaking my ‘vrat’ from blogging. The only problem with that wonderfully written post was that it was in Tamil language instead of the regular English. Why am saying is, these are the posts and research works should be made available to most of the foreigners to Tamil language. I strongly believe that Tamil language has failed to give the due honour to people like VanduMama, Mullai Thangarasan, Charu Nivedita etc

As today is the birthday of the greatest ever story teller for children of all ages, am going to post one of my favourite childhood stories. Now, most of you would have thought that i will be posting something like Charu the smart (Oh, no – not this charu nivedita). However, i liked Bale balu a lot more than Charu the smart. Hence one of my all time favourite episode from that story line. Iam fortunate enough to have this story line in both the languages (Tamil & English) in my collection (Bless my chithra aunt for the collection idea). before it is a tad boring with my blabbering's, Friends, countrymen and bloggers, here i present – Balu the Bully in Tamil.

Now, this particular story was published in English in the English version of Gokulam from the year 2000 onwards. Let me narrate why this particular incident was more favourite than some of the better written stories of the same series.

I was studying in the 2nd year in my UG and during the summer vocations we travelled to our Aunt’s home in Vellore and there we had my nephew named balasubramanian doing almost the same tricky things that i used to do in my younger days – a la Bale Balu. so, when everyone else was calling him bala, i started to call him balu and he was curious to know why am calling him differently and i explained to him about the Balu character with my stories and also the latest Gokulam was available in the Mani aiyyar shop (next to that big pharmacy, oops i forgot the name of the pharmacy) and this was the story which was published in that particular issue of Gokulam.

Later on, he became almost a bully just like myself. now, let me get rid of those old memories and present Balu for the 1st time in English in the blogosphere. here is the same episode as that of the Tamil version.

Now, here is a BIG thanks to a person who made my childhood sweeter than anybody else. He is my companion, my knight in shining armour, my bed time story teller and my 4 AM friend in all those days when i was growing up. Thank you Mr Vandu Mama, You are my best teacher. In fact, You are the University from which i graduated with flying colours. Thanks for everything.