Kathayan Maazayan!

An initiative to take storytelling to homes and open spaces

•  The Belief

India has always been a land of storytellers . Over the centuries we have honed the fine art of telling the short story - be it in our epics, our mythologies, our folk tales or in our more recent writings. Told by traditional katha vachaks, village storytellers and our favourite grandmothers, we have all grown up on these stories that have taught us our values, our morals, our culture. Story telling is one of our oldest art forms. Long before the television and the computer came into our lives, storytelling was the chief leisure activity. In the villages, which are yet to we still have the community spaces, the chaupals where adults gather in the evening after a hard day's work to exchange news and anecdotes and a good storyteller has always been and still is a valuable attribute to the community.

Katha believes that story can be one powerful tool in helping change scenarios

•  The vision and mission goals of this initiative

•  An effort to help enhance the story's presence in homes

•  Build skills in storytelling

•  Help regain India 's preeminent position as a land of storytellers.

•  Background

•  We are an aural society. Many are still in the process of moving from listening rather than reading.

•  The telling and listening of stories have cemented the communities/families/relationships, provided the interactive spaces between the listener and the teller, created an emotive-responsive space where the teller and the listener are both actors and switch roles naturally, both, in the asking of questions in between, or just through rapt attention affirming hawing.

•  The telling of stories have validated and affirmed relationships, providing a continuum of feeling looked after, special, wanted and needed.

•  A repository of wisdom and age old truths garnered over years and funneled through a way of living and thinking, the telling of stories in personal and public forums have provided insights in a most acceptable and unthreatening manner while respecting the personal spaces.

•  Some Concerns

•  With the advent of television and other IT technology, verbal/physical communication is literally disintegrating, creating unnatural silences punctured only by the glitz of artificially generated single sided communication sounds. We se computers and storytelling as not being antithetical to one another.

•  With the dying of languages and disappearing of cultures, many of our traditional storytelling forms are getting lost.

•  The pace of the cities coupled with the nucleus families and career pathways has disintegrated the meaningful communication fabric still further.

•  The Attempt

•  To forge new alternate connections: grandparents may not be where their grandchildren are . but there are other children and the Grandparent-teacher Association can help make the connections between the generations .

•  To revive and sustain the traditional through infusing the traditional with the contemporary and the contemporary with the traditional.

•  To enhance individual capacities in telling a story.

•  .And for creating and sustaining a narrative imagination.

•  We work through -

•  Workshops for parents, grandparents, family members on:

•  the art of storytelling: storytelling, voice modulation, body language, etc

•  ethics of myths, legends and contemporary stories.

•  interactive spaces between traditional and contemporary storytellers amongst themselves and with audiences

•  sharing/swapping stories between family members.

•  events, celebration, and awareness generating activities.

•  Responsibilities:

•  Build closer bonds between children, parents and grandparents by giving them a common medium to interact

•  Familiarize children, teenagers and adults with Indian Literatures

•  Create awareness about our myths, customs and traditions

•  Encourage people to explore their unique expressiveness and heighten ones ability to communicate thoughts and feelings in an articulate, lucid manner

•  Help participants collectively recreate our position as a land of storytellers

•  Reach of the Project

•  Within Delhi ; Outreach Programme.

•  Range of the Project

•  Contemporary to traditional storytellers; Children to grandparents; Rural to Urban

•  Documentation.

•  Regular and systematic documentation of work - people met, workshops conducted, modules

•  The quarterly and annual report which will be a narrative

•  Kathaayan mazaayan for families ( Storytelling, antaksharis, theatre activities, film appreciation etc)

•  Dwani: The Art and Craft of Storytelling: MASTER CLASSES WITH EXPERTS

•  Katha Theatre Group ( one firm group; work towards a production )

•  DanaDini CLUB (Story Swappers Club)

•  WRITERS WORKSHOP (creative writing for children and young adults; translation skills)

•  PREMCHAND ka PITARA ( Stories from the bhashas, discussed; help schools do their annual day etc with these instead of imported texts)

•  GPTA: the grandparents-teachers association in schools for storytelling. Katha offers them a package