Out of the mouths of li’l babes: What We dislike

Do not judge a book by its cover, wrote a 11-year-old girl, except this one: she drew a book cover bearing the legend, 1,001 pictures of Donald Trump.

She concluded with the sage observation that this one is guaranteed to be AWFUL. Republicans are sure to see in this precocious partisanship a preternatural perversity: after all, the same girl had written, when she was just six, a macabre tale of a chocolate dog who was taken to a dog show on a day the weather forecast said would be sunny but turned out to be rainy, with the consequence that poor Coco melted.

Another little girl began her story, The Chattering Souls, with these lines: as the day becomes night, the ghosts start to stir. Some literally start to stir, because they are chef ghosts.


It is a good thing these works of budding penmanship were produced in the US. Had little girls dared such literary forays in an Indian school, merriment would probably be the last result.

The first little girl would, at the least, have been dubbed an urban naxal, if not booked for sedition, and the second one, chastised for confusing stir in its transitive form with stir in its intransitive form, besides for ignoring the obvious detail that before stirring, chefs have to cut and chop whatever they then stir. Little girls must, after all, learn their rightful place and the right sequence of that place.