Kiran Bedi, How to Lose a Shoe : Learn English (US) with subtitles - Story for Children & Adults
fun,teacher,reading,tutorial,Lose,Gandhiji,education,lessons,parents,family,animation,Kiran Bedi,Children stories in English (US),audio,school,stories,mistake,children,language,captions,subtitles,Shoe,student,Animation,kids,readalong,bookbox,read,books,cartoon,Learn English (US)
Have you ever lost a shoe and gone looking for it? Not Kiran Bedi. Not Gandhiji.
Translator/Author : Kiran Bedi
Narration : Bernadette Joseph
Music : Acoustricks
Illustration : M Karthiravan
Animation : BookBox
How to Lose a Shoe
As the train arrived,
I ran to the nearest
women’s compartment.
I wriggled my way through the crowd
and found myself
a place to stand.
I had to travel a lot in those days
as I played competitive tennis.
As the train began to
pull out of the station,
I looked around and realised
that some of the women passengers
were staring aggressively at me.
All of a sudden,
one of them
sprang up from her seat
and whacked me
with her umbrella.
That was the signal
for all the other women.
They all pressed around me
and began to beat me
with whatever they carried,
shouting,
“These dirty boys
will stop at nothing.”
In that chaos, I realised
that they had mistaken me
for a boy
who they thought
had purposely walked into the
women’s compartment.
The reason for their assumption
dawned upon me
while I was still being beaten.
I was dressed in slacks,
a loose shirt and shoes.
My short haircut
did not help me either.
I was pushed and dragged
towards the door.
I kept shouting,
“Please believe me, I am a girl.”
But no one even bothered to listen
to what I said.
I was brought right to the door
While clinging to the door bars
desperately,
one of my shoes
slipped off my foot
and fell on the tracks.
I held on to the bars for dear life
while being pushed
and let my second shoe also fall.
I did this
so that whoever got my first shoe
would now find a pair.
Of course,
I did manage to hang on
till the next station
and then let myself fall
on the platform.
I remember when I fell,
the hard concrete felt
really comforting
after all that pushing and pulling.
Several months after this episode,
I read that Gandhiji had also done
something similar.
While travelling on a train,
one of his slippers had fallen off,
so he promptly
threw down the other.
When he got off the train,
he walked with a smile
to greet his hosts.
He was oblivious to the fact
that he was barefoot.
When his friends noticed
and asked
how he had lost both his slippers,
he narrated the incident and said,
“I am happy
someone will be able
to use them.”
BookBox
Our mission is to produce animated stories that are powered by Same Language Subtitling (SLS) a scientifically tested and proven approach to help improve reading skills and language learning, ultimately promoting a love for reading.
AniBooks flow from a simple fact – children love to watch cartoons. Thus, AniBooks are animated stories for children, with the narration appearing on-screen as Same Language Subtitles (SLS). BookBox was founded in 2004 after winning a business plan competition at Stanford University, called, the Social e-Challenge.