Brown Paper Packages

Brown Paper Packages tied up with string....
These are a few of my favourite things.
Warm, exciting, woodsy and so brown... I love the smell of brown paper and the visual appeal of packs made of it. They are reminiscent of summer holidays spent in covering and labeling books and notebooks for the beginning of the new session or warm, fresh out of the oven cakes and buns and offcourse new books - lots and lots of them.
Poly bags are nice and attractive but they just take away the deep pleasure and satisfaction one feels when one buys something from a store. I love Nalli that way - they wrap the clothes in a brown bag, expertly tuck the open edges inside and then slide them into their Nalli cloth bags. And offcourse the brown, firm, Fab India tote bags and great to take home the purchases. Clothes invitingly stacked together inside and carried home in style.
And I love the sheer variety of shades possible in brown papers - the sombre, very dark, almost blackish brown, or the light sandy brown or the bright, almost orangeish brown- to name a few. The myriad of hues possible in brown itself was evident when the teacher would carry the homework notebooks in a pile.
Yesterday I had been to Tulika Office in Alwarpet. A typical home office, with hardly 5 people I observed. Brown cane chairs with colorful tables in the reception and a stack of books displayed for browsing. I spent a whole hour there browsing slowly over their catalogue, going through each book evaluating them for suitability for Ojas & Tejas, shortlisting books that I loved and then making a final list of what I want to buy. And they offer 10% discount on the final price.
In a single word, Tulika books are delightful. They touch your soul unlike the usual fairy tales. They tickle your imagination, leave room for the kids to interpret and form their own versions. They attempt to keep our tradition alive, tell a story but at the same time do not take their sight off the concepts, teach kids words of regional origin, and also expose them to International locations. To tell you the truth, I wanted to pick up the entire lot- but then forced myself to be content with a dozen of them.
I have picked up English, Hindi, Tamil and bilingual ones. Some of them are specified for 6 years and above but I picked them because I loved them!
And they were neatly piled and pushed inside a brown paper bag and handed over to me. As I walked back to the car, I hugged the brown paper package to my chest and digged my nose into the pack, taking in the mingled smell of new books and brown paper bag.
So watch out for the reviews!