Sometime recently, Abhishek (my 3.5-year-old son) fell in love with McQueen and Mater. It started when we bought a reading book “Driving Buddies” from Crossword. We must have read that book 100 times by now! Till then, I had no clue about who they were. Now of course, I know. They are two of the characters from Pixar’s animation movie, Cars. McQueen is the rookie racing car who is competing with two others to win the Piston Cup. On Thursday (Gandhi Jayanti holiday), Abhishek and I watched the full 2-hour movie at home. He had plenty of questions throughout the movie as he tried to correlate the brief story we had read with what was happening in the movie. I too enjoyed watching it – and explaining it to Abhi. The quality of animation and the storyline is very good, and so is the message at end, where McQueen sacrifices a historic win to help a friend.
At home now, there are at least a couple other McQueen-Mater books and vehicles which Abhi drives around, and a McQueen T-shirt I bought for him when I was in the US recently. For now, this specific set of Cars are his favourites. Don’t even ask what else he likes to read nowadays. Snakes.
