Jesse Ramdeo

Tariq Baig is prov­ing age is just a num­ber. At on­ly sev­en years old, he has writ­ten and pub­lished his own book which fo­cus­es on a mes­sage for both the young and not so young.

Decked off in a pin­striped shirt, black pants and bow tie yes­ter­day, the Stan­dard One Av­o­cat Vedic Pri­ma­ry school pupil was beam­ing with joy and flash­ing smiles be­neath his face mask dur­ing his book launch at Nigel R Khan Book­sellers.

Tariq, an as­pir­ing pi­lot, does not on­ly have a knack for read­ing but writ­ing as well and may have steered off course in pur­suit of his dreams, as he re­cent­ly spilt his cre­ative juices in­to “The Naughty Drag­on,” which he penned dur­ing these un­prece­dent­ed times.

Ac­cord­ing to him, the con­cept came about one day dur­ing vir­tu­al class.

“I was in­spired by my teacher Ms Priya when we were learn­ing about fan­ta­sy and fic­tion, that was when the idea came to me.”

His book tracks the ad­ven­tures of a mis­chie­vous crea­ture and doles out a key les­son as well. He said it was very im­por­tant that read­ers are able to un­der­stand the mes­sage with­in the pages of his pub­li­ca­tion.

“The moral is im­por­tant be­cause it teach­es you some­thing ... and what does it teach you? Not to de­stroy any­thing that does not be­long to you,” he said.

Tariq ex­plained that dur­ing his down­time, he would jot down ideas on his moth­er’s lap­top and while he did most of the work, it was her eyes that proof­read his fi­nal piece.

Store man­ag­er Ve­na Mo­hammed said the young au­thor’s jour­ney was an in­spi­ra­tion to oth­ers.

“I think it’s awe­some to see a child at that age, sev­en years, writ­ing a book and it has so much mean­ing in it and he used his time in this pan­dem­ic and I think many chil­dren will learn a lot from the mean­ing and mes­sages in the book.”

Tariq al­ready has his sights set on pub­lish­ing an­oth­er book, a sec­ond in­stal­ment to “The Naughty Drag­on,” and hopes to have it pub­lished be­fore his 8th birth­day.