Ideal Boy (Dewi Lewis Publishing/D.A.P., 2001) documents a delightful
aspect of Indian pop culture: educational charts. Sirish Rao--a writer based
in Chennai and coauthor of the book--is fascinated with the charts he encountered
in childhood and has amassed a collection of more than a thousand of them,
including some very old and rare ones that have not been produced since
the late 1950s.
Designed for the classroom, they cover every subject imaginable, from science
and technology to guides on proper manners. Educational charts can be found
posted across India in post offices and railway stations, among other
public spaces. Although didactic in nature, many of them are riddled with
errors that defy all logic. People and objects are often bizarrely rendered;
the names of places and things are routinely misspelled. For example, a
chart on insect life includes panels on the life cycles of frogs and chickens.
