Children connect with their roots through online storytelling sessions

Dressed in an Avengers T-shirt, Aariv Prakash, a 9-year-old resident of Sector 50 comes on the camera with his mother, Monisha Prakash, to narrate the tale of Kalpavriksh,

Dressed in an Avengers T-shirt, Aariv Prakash, a 9-year-old resident of Sector 50 comes on the camera with his mother, Monisha Prakash, to narrate the tale of Kalpavriksh, a mythical wishing tree. They start with a jingle and then introduce their first character, Babu, a turban-wearing stuffed minion walking across the desert. The mother-son duo then follows his journey of wishes as he travels across the desert. Almost once a week they come together to narrate folktales on their YouTube channel to break the monotony of the lockdown.

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“In this folktale from Rajasthan, we used a minion as a puppet. My son said let’s use him as a character; so we dressed him up in a turban,” said Prakash, an educator. She adds that the idea behind the videos is to engage children and to help them think creatively in terms of telling stories. The mother-son duo has so far created over 10 videos on their social media handles. Their channel includes tales of Akbar-Birbal, Tenali Raman, animals and popular folktales children hear in their childhood.

For the longest time, grandparents and extended family members have been responsible for telling stories. During these sessions, stories they grew up with would get passed on orally to children before bedtime or during vacations. In an urban setup, where nuclear families reside in large numbers, the absence of these usual storytellers has prompted parents to look for alternatives.

“There are two basic reasons parents opt for storytelling sessions. First is a functional reason. These story sessions are meant to keep the children engaged. The second reason is to make them learn. Parents want their children to learn and assimilate the traditional value system,” said Narayan Parasuram, the co-founder of Karadi Tales. Parasuram conducted an online storytelling session in association with Gurgaon Moms last week that was attended by close to 30 children. He shared the tale of “The Foolish Crow”. The publishing house says that it has seen a spike in its storytelling sessions and has been conducting them on a daily basis since the lockdown began. These sessions conducted by celebrities, authors and illustrators come under its new segment called “Katha with Karadi”.

These sessions are also seeing a renewed push for introducing regional folklore, Indian fables and contemporary stories to children. Prakash adds children these days are exposed to a wide number of gadgets where they get exposed to modern and international stories. However, amid those, stories that used to be narrated by grandmothers are easily getting lost.

“Through our sessions, we are trying to get children accustomed to stories that are based on or rooted in our Indian culture,” said Prachi Gambhir Dutta, founder of Kal-Aakaar Collective Trust, that hosts prop-based story dramas for children on its YouTube channel, BeeMee. One of the latest videos published by the collective is the adventure of four frogs who ventured out to see what lies at the end of a rainbow.

“The Four Frog song that we shared is actually a very old Haryanvi poem that my aunt taught us when we were very small. I have been listening to it and it stayed with me. It was only last year that I converted it to a Hindi-English song for children,” said Dutta.

Experts agree that most often, the push by parents and school for stories in English means that regional tales get sidelined. These sessions often use regional terms for animals like kauwa (crow) and mendak (frog). Bilingual narratives, they agree, are faring relatively well in outreach as it connects better with children.

“We need to attempt storytelling in such a way and in such language that it becomes universally acceptable by children. With a bilingual approach, we are trying to reach out to a larger audience because at the end of the day English is also a foreign language that we have to learn. Bilingual songs and stories help a child relate to the story and connect with it better,” added Dutta.

The sessions also offer additive engagement activities, such as creating your own props, puppet-making, enactment of storylines, singalongs and others.

However, these sessions are not just restricted to children. Adults too are attending storytelling sessions, seeing them as a chance to break away from usual entertainment. These sessions stay away from fables, folklores and preachy tales but base their stories on real-life situations. Monika Agarwal is a soft skills expert, who is using storytelling sessions to share tales that suggest societal reconditioning. On Mother’s Day, Agarwal narrated the story of a modern working mother who had to go without breakfast but stopped short of telling her children “I am not hungry” when she noticed just two apples remaining in the fridge.

“These stories are mostly around day-to-day situations. We need to show our children that we are also humans and that we also feel hungry so that they are not conditioned into thinking that mothers can be taken for granted. I want to free our minds from ideas that are no longer relevant to the current world,” said Agarwal, a resident of Sector 49.