O literalists, thoda fantasy allow kijiye

As Paresh Rawal may well have said in a Golmaal movie, 'Why so kum imagination, re bhai?' A low-level quarrel has broken out in the public space over an essay in a school textbook in Karnataka that has an historical person flying in and out of his prison cell on the back of bulbuls every day Harry Potter-on-a-Hungarian Horntail dragon-style. Literalists have read this travelogue by Kannada writer K T Gatti as ridiculous - since, er, people can't fly on the backs of birds.

Never mind mythological mounts for deities, reading things literally could get many a character laughed out of the building. Haroun Khalifa of Salman Rushdie's 'Sea of Stories' fame, for instance, rode on a hoopoe bird. Sinbad the Sailor had a magic flying carpet. True, these are fictional characters, while the bulbul-rider in the essay isn't. But magical realism knows no bounds. Marc Chagall depicted his wife and him flying about in his paintings. Kitsch regularly depicts history's heroes being towed around in the sky by swans, etc. As in dreams, creativity allows reason to be entertained by fantasy. In any case, class 8 students, for whom the essay is meant to be, are old enough to know that real humans - however loved or despised - can't fly bird-back. So, adults, chill and sit back if you can't take an imaginative leap, preferably on the back of a dolphin.