Mahagiri by Hemalata, Illustrated by Pulak Biswas

We picked up a couple of Telugu books from the Bookshelf Library a couple of weeks back - one of which was Mahagiri, a Telugu translation of an English book of the same name, published by Children's Book Trust. Luffy liked reading it - but I skipped a couple of pages from the book where Mahagiri (the elephant) is tortured (prodded and stabbed) by its handler because he wasn't doing as the handler was saying. I'm afraid Luffy is a little too young for me to talk to him about humans harming animals and going into the details about why the man did it, even if he apologized for it later.

I mentioned this to the librarian at the Bookshelf Library and she laughed because she had done the same a few times in the past when she hosted read-out-loud sessions. But to my surprise she said that the kids had always caught her, prompting in an awkward but necessary conversation with the children.

The book gave me the opportunity to remind Luffy that he saw an elephant in the past - at a temple in South India. Preeti and I need to plan a safari visit in the near future because we would like Luffy to have memories of wild elephants instead of elephants living in captivity.