Armaan's 8th Birthday

Yellow Lillies in the Backyard

Deepa had these re-planted in the backyard some time ago, and now they've propagated into an entire row. Whats even nicer is they way they bloom all at the same time !

Knowing what to Keep

We all lose some parts of ourselves through life's battles. The trick is to know which parts we can allow to die and which we need to keep. 

[ Self June 2012 ]

Storytelling

I have been deeply considering the power of the human narrative form. Especially through story. There is so much that is transferred from one person to another through story telling. Especially from one generation to another, and that is where the first block begins.

We somehow think that stories are meant for kids. Yet we increasingly see that most information we receive in our adult lives is in story form, one way or another. We read newspapers for the front page stories, we watch movies for the stories they tell us, contemporary education and management studies are being built upon case studies which are real stories of companies and their business scenarios.

When we get back home and our spouse asks us how our day went, we are effectively telling them a story. In fact, studies show us that those messages that are best understood by us are those that are packaged in stories. This is now commonly used by many writers who use so much anecdotal material to better illustrate their point.

Some of the most enduring texts we have like the Ramayan or the Mahabharat, while probably put on paper in the last few hundred years, has survived largely through story. The Bible too. And we all know how much the good shepherd loved to use parables to convey what he had to.

Somehow stories seem to be the common denominator amongst us. The imagery, and inherent richness of our internal worlds is best captured through them. Abstract ideas, moral values, ethics, principles and even divine instruction is well suited to narrative.

This I believe, is highly undervalued today and also poorly understood for what its true potential could be.

We have relegated the task of education to the so called "teachers" of our schools. The entire system of education today being widely accepted to be just another "industry".

We have completely submitted our entertainment values and needs to the television and cinema industry, which is producing content of such inferior quality it is alarming.
I feel it is far too important to let the stories that reach our children's ears and minds be subjected to these more popular and insidiously pervasive mediums. We cannot sit back and just go with the flow here.

They turned the best of these into comic books via the Amar Chitra Kathas during our time, which was condensed, yet acceptable. But now they produce stuff on TV like Bal Hanuman or Chota Bheem. You only need to watch 10 minutes of that stuff to know what I'm talking about.

How much richer the content. How better framed, constructed and delivered if we were actively involved in the stories we tell our kids. What more could we weave into them ?
The most well known ones, and those still retold today like Red Riding Hood or Hansel & Gretel and hundreds of others while seemingly out of context in our world today, were all clearly products of the fertile imagination of parents and grandparents at some time.

More importantly, they continue to be told and have endured. We just need to dig a little bit deeper to find the "real story" they may have been based upon and the truth and value that lives within them.

As I am fond of telling my kids :

"Every story has a little bit of truth in it, just as every truth has a little bit of story in it."

Think about it.

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