Boys his age go to school, plan their lessons, get marks and study again. Siddharth Babu, a class X student too follows the routine, and at the same time edited his dad’s book of poems and published it via his newly- found book house, Blueberry Books. The young boy was still attending classes when dad Santhosh Babu narrated to us the birth of his maiden book — Mathi Bhramathinte Kuthirakal.
Santhosh, a freelance writer and former journalist, has been writing for over two decades and the little boy grew up watching pieces of hand-written paper piling up day after day. One day he decided to question his dad and snatched all of them away from his custody. “We debated a lot. In the end, he picked all my poems saying he knows what to do. A few days later, I found him doing something with it. He was serious about it. He selected 90 poems out of them, sectioned it into three and made the book,” explains Santhosh.
Siddharth named his publishing house Blueberry Books as a tribute to Shelvi of Mulberry Publications, a revolutionary in the Malayalam publishing sector. “Whenever I talked about Shelvi, he used to listen with rapt attention. Though we were not acquaintances, I had met and talked to him,” he says.
Unfortunate you may call it, Santhosh lost two volumes of his poems in the past. One compromised by a computer virus and the other lost to termite attack. The available works were picked by the son to publish into a book.
A student at Kendriya Vidyalaya, Malayalam has never been a part of Siddharth’s academics but too much of it is present in his genes. His mom Deena P.R., a former bank employee, also has a good command over the language. The editing skills, the dad feels, came to him that way. “He might have sought his mom’s help. Even for creating the division for my poems, he had a reason; he felt elements of anarchy in my poems! The three sections were created based on its highs and lows. He also writes. I want him to be an author in his own way and he is at it,” he adds.
