The Thousand and One Nights reviews “The Old Man and the World”

TEHRAN,July 9(MNA) -- “The Old Man and the World”, a docudrama about Iranian children’s author Mehdi Azar Yazdi, was aired and reviewed during the Iranian TV program The Thousand and One Nights on Saturday night. Director Puria Azarbaijani attended the program, which airs weekly on Channel 4, the sole Iranian TV station that gives the viewers food for thought. Azarbaijani described the documentary as one of great experiences of his life. “From the beginning, I learned that Azar Yazdi was a forgotten man in his homeland,” he added. “His books are often bought by parents. I have not seen young people pursue his works,” he stated. “Today, young people pursue their own interest through various modern media available to them. They find it difficult to search for Azar Yazdi’s books, which are mostly based on Persian classical works,” Azarbaijani said. Asked by anchorman Rashid Kakavand about the similarity between the film’s title and Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Old Man and the Sea”, Azarbaijani said that there is no connection between the two works except homonymity. Azarbaijani conducted interviews on Azar Yazdi for the documentary. “Azar Yazdi! You opened the gate of literature to me and other Iranian schoolchildren,” the 75-year-old Iranian children’s author Turan Mirhadi says in a part of the documentary. The documentary also contains interviews with Azar Yazdi. “I keep on praying that God will increase the number of children. He increases the number of children, but only the soccer children and not the book reading children,” Azar Yazdi says in the docudrama. Azar Yazdi never married. Once, he was asked the reason for this and he joked, “I could not live with a crazy woman, and if she was a wise woman, she could never live with me!” Azar Yazdi passed away at the age of 88 in Tehran in July 2009. His eight-volume stories “Good Stories for Good Children” earned him national fame. The collection provides children with access to the great works of classical Persian literature such as the Gulistan (The Rose Garden), the Masnavi-ye Manavi, the Marzban-Nameh, the Sinbadnameh, and some stories from the Holy Quran and the life of the Prophet Muhammad (S) and his Household (AS). The collection won a UNESCO prize in 1966 and was selected as Iran’s book of the year in 1967. In addition, his “Adam” won the title in 1968. His credits also included “The Naughty Cat”, “The Playful Cat”, “Simple Stories”, “Poetry of Sugar and Honey”, and “Masnavi of Good Children”.