Fairy Tales of the World

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On my trip to India this Summer, I dug through all the books that I owned when growing up and found this. My favorite book… Fairy Tales of the World. I was in fourth grade when everyone around me realized that I was reading all sorts of books both in English and Marathi at a lightning speed. So my uncle gifted this book to me (the first year that I did not receive a dress from him for my birthday!!) This is the most cherished book that I have ever owned, mostly because it was the first real book that I owned. Before that I mostly bought all sorts of comics or read books from the library. It also had beautiful pictures and obviously increased my knowledge (and curiosity!!) about different countries and cultures. The rest of the years growing up were full of many more books that I devoured every summer from my uncle's book collection. Digging through all those books I also realized how much my parents had done to encourage my reading habit. I had all sorts of books  in English and Marathi, with topics ranging from science and geography to world history. I owned Marathi translations of books written by Russian authors. It made me want to pack all those books and bring them with me, to read them one more time. Maybe one day I will do that!


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