A little girl, Alia, discovers she has the gift — that very childlike superpower — of communicating with Nature. She rescues and forges a bond with Ed, an abandoned pup, and is assisted on this adventure by a talking crow and a talking coconut tree. So runs the premise of Alia Bhatt’s debut work as an author (she demurs at the label, preferring ‘storyteller’ instead), a children’s picture book titled Adventures of Ed-a-Mamma: Ed finds a Home .
Published by Puffin, the children’s imprint of Penguin Random House, the book is co-created with Vivek Kamath and Shabnam Minwalla and illustrated by Tanvi Bhat. The first of a planned series, it expands on Alia’s vision, embodied in her sustainable clothing brand Ed-a-Mamma, of creating ‘mini-planeteers’ — getting children to engage with Nature and sustainability at an intimate, imaginative level. In a conversation with The Hindu, the actor-entrepreneur spoke about the journey of creating the book, how motherhood deepened her love for storytelling and her plans for expanding the series into an animated show and toyline.
Excerpts ...
When did you first start working on this series of stories for children? This was pre-Covid and pre-Ed-a-Mamma. Vivek Kamath and I sat down and thought of doing a series of children’s books and turning that into an animation series. We had the germ of an idea, about a little girl who rescues a dog (‘Ed’ comes from the name of one of my three cats, Edward) and how they go on littl.
