Story tellers!

A young girl asked her mother, “Ma, please tell me the story where there is no King or Queen. The story that relates to you and me, the anguish of every heart, the fragrance of the world. The story that does not talk about pretty angels in the heaven. The story that will teach me to smile and forget my hunger and that is filled with moonlight of truth and rays of hope. A story which is not old and often repeated. This is the essence of the song “Maa Sunao Mujhe Woh Kahani” composed by Jagjit Singh.

We often say stories in which the king or queen lives in the royal palace and finally they live happily forever. The real life is not so like the king and queen lived in the palace. Every day is a challenge in the modern world for every life. Instead of saying fictional stories, let us say the daily happening, struggles, happiness, sadness, and small victories as stories so they understand the reality and when they face the world individually it will become easier for them to relate to the stories.

Art of Storytelling

Story telling is an art, which is slowly declining in today’s world due to the advent of technology and mobile invasion. How SMS in mobile service killed the writing skills, mobile phones has killed the interaction within us. In olden days, there was no internet, libraries and all the information was transferred from one generation to the next generation through stories. Many arts, skills, culture, science, medicine etc survived through stories.

Story telling is a wonderful art and they go deep into the memory that never fades away. It was the reason for transforming information from one generation to another. I remember my Bible teacher used to tell stories and I would travel to the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon” built by the king Nebuchadnezzar and come back to the class once the watchman hits the hanging iron rod for the bell [Class time over]. I always wonder why the watchman is not hitting the hanging iron rod for the bell in case of the Maths class?? I look out through the class window searching the watchman whenever Maths class goes on. No stories and Maths class is always dull. The marks in Bible was always more than 90 out of 100 and marks in Maths was always near the border of pass mark! I understood anything told as story becomes interesting and goes deep into the memory. So, all my training session starts with a story and participants reach on time as how the movie is watched from the title.

Grandma’s story of the crow and old woman.

An old lady lived alone. She used to make a delicious food called “vada” every day and sold it outside her house. One day a clever crow saw the plate full of vada. The old lady went inside her house to drink some water. The crow quickly picked up a vada from the plate and flew away fast. It went a long distance and reached a forest. The crow thought, “Old lady cannot follow me this far. I am very hungry. It smells too good. Let me eat” It sat down in a tree.

A fox came that side smelled vada. “Wow! What is this yummy smell? I wanna eat.” It looked around and found no one nearer at sight. It wondered and then looked up to see the crow having the vada. Fox made a trick to eat that vada and said ‘Hi Beautiful crow! You look awesome. Can you sing for me?” Crow was very happy to hear it is beautiful.  It opened the mouth and started singing “Ka Ka Kaaa. Ka Ka Kaaa……” for the fox. The vada fell down from crow’s mouth and the fox took and run away.

This is the story every grand mother tells her grandchildren and this must be going on for many generations. In olden days, when there was no power, our grandparents used to narrate stories in the evening, so stories like Mahabharata continued for generations together till today. Same holds for stories in other countries too.

In movies, great story tellers become great Directors. The way they say stories is the way they move the movie. Directors Bhagaraj and Mani Ratnam are excellent story tellers. Rajesh Kumar was an excellent crime novel writer. His crime novels were published in the weekly magazines and I would get up early in the morning at 5am waiting for the delivery boy to grab the magazine first and read his novel in the morning before any of our family member reads, it was so thrilling. Once he was writing a fictional crime series for Ananda Vikatan magazine and wanted to know what ‘gene therapy’ was?. He took classes under a professor in the Gene Department for a week for the story. So preparations goes before telling a story.

In the corporate world, good story tellers are great leaders. Effective leaders should have many skills and one of the skill is story telling. The way they connect people with the stories and inching towards the goal is one of the leadership skill one should learn.

Benefits of story telling

It has lot of benefits like, it develops good communication both oral and written, clarity of thoughts, decision making, imagination, easy explanation and many more. It is a good parenting skill too. Ask your children, how was the day? They would start narrating. Make it a habit and a story is born!

So narrate stories as lovers, parents, teachers, guide, leaders, and individuals. We shall keep the mobiles away and narrate beautiful real stories which are happening day to day to our children. It helps them a lot in facing the harsh realities of life, how to face them as examples given as stories. As parents it is our duty to the society too. Our Sunday mornings at our home are always a story telling session. Stories of Bible, Mahabharat, Ramayana, our life experiences, motivational events/stories and many more, are discussed it is endless!

So start narrating stories and become a good story teller. Good Luck folks, the world needs story tellers!

At the end, we all become stories!

Note-The images given for representation in this blog are taken from Google / Unsplash Images. Many thanks for Google & Unsplash.