Popular children’s writer discovers his culinary skills

Arunika Mohapatra | TNN | Apr 15, 2020, 04:52 IST

Bhubaneswar: Had it not been for the lockdown and his wife being away in Boston with their son, popular children’s writer Jitendra Narayan Dash, popular as Dash Benhur, would have never discovered his culinary skills. “I had seen my wife prepare food and learnt by observing. Thankfully, rice and dalma both turned out well,” said Dash, who is confined to his home.
His day starts at 4 am. He gets down to write for children with a steaming cup of tea beside him. These days, he writes two poems for children that he posts on Facebook every day. These are ‘Chime a Rhyme’ in English and ‘Tinanka Pain Nanabaya’ in Odia and a couplet in the Bhagabata style.
“During the lockdown, nobody talks about children. I started posting poems on Facebook to keep the children entertained,” said Dash, a Bal Sahitya Puraskar awardee in 2014.
Besides cooking, Dash also has to water 85 potted plants in his terrace garden. He considers it a good exercise climbing floors to go to the terrace and moving around with a bucketful of water. He also does other odd jobs in the house apart from watching world and local news before retiring for the day around 9 pm with a Netflix documentary series for company. His favourites are ‘Death of Stalin’ and ‘Fall of Czars’.
Dash, a retired principal of SCS College, Puri, feels that the lockdown has taught him to use time better and to internalise things. “After the Covid-19 pandemic, people will look with respect at village life where every house is a self-sustaining unit. Villagers usually have foodgrains stored for a year and vegetables are sourced from the kitchen garden. Also, old-timers are very particular about cleaning their hands and feet before entering the house, which has now become a norm worldwide since the outbreak of the virus,” said Dash, who has stocked up on essential food items and has not left the house in the past 20 days.