Kathalaya Welcomes
2010

Wishes for a great year ahead

The Story Hour -Issue 3

-My story, Your story, Our story

From the director's desk...

From quiet homes and first beginnings

Out to the undiscovered ends……

Along time ago when I first began to teach in 1980 at a small school near my house I recall the smell of the old wooden benches and children huddled together sharing their lunch, singing and playing together. All the staff members would cram into the kitchen of that house which served as the school building -laughing and sharing our tales of happiness and woes and quickly helping each other with charts and Notes of lessons. Each moment was exciting and we loved the school despite a meager amount of Rs. 300/- that we received as a salary.

The noise of cell phones mobiles and computers were still unknown. The air was filled with natural sounds of children, buses, drums and swings and of the rain and wind over the tin sheets.

2009. I enter a school which looks huge and grotesque - all glass everywhere, with state of the art classrooms, a theater, boardroom, studio and screens everywhere.

The teachers were trained in the art of teaching using touch screens while children stared mechanically at them repeating the rhymes taught by the screens.

What was missing was probably a button on the child. Perhaps several years later once you pressed the button on the child they would begin to sing and produce everything that is shown on the screen. There would be no need to think, imagine, create, calculate, observe and listen. One just needs to learn the skill of operating and responding to machines. A row of children were walking one behind the other like robots.

I thought of two books I had read –‘Absence of the Sacred’ by Jerry Meander and ‘Hurried children’-Growing up too fast too soon by David Elkind.

I ran out feeling uncomfortable and confined to an unnatural space. The physical space was huge but somewhere the creator in a hurry had forgotten to fix the soul. And each school looked just like the previous one. I searched for something. I tried to locate it but everything was too plastic and new to even deposit a thought.

The Heads of the school kept continuously talking about multiple Intelligence skills, Smart classes, new screens, computerized gadgets, high end canteens, new openings abroad, affiliations to boards unheard of and ceaseless chattering of minds with no end.

“Individuals fending only for themselves is hell, said Vinoba Bhave while individuals working, thinking together as a community supporting each other is heaven”.

Once upon a time a man wanted to find out what hell and heaven were like. First he opted to see hell. The place looked good. People had a large room for themselves. When the bell rang all of them emerged from their rooms. The tall people with long legs and long arms sat on either side of along decorated table. They were hungry. The food was fine too, all dishes were served. When they began to eat they used spoons but since they had stiff long arms they could not reach their moths and the food kept going over their shoulder behind their back and falling on the floor. The visitor was amused. Then the visitor went to heaven. All the residents lived in a cluster of rooms around a courtyard. The visitor could hear the conversation interspersed with laughter. Tall people came out of their rooms and sat down on either side of the long table. The same food was served . But each one fed the person on the opposite side and satisfied each others hunger.

I also felt that each person seated on the desks chairs, benches and rooms had an attitude of ‘I am the best and I need to bow to no one.’ I returned to our office and resource center with the red oxide flooring, tiled roof with the leaves drooping down and the squirrels running above our heads while we worked. I felt so blessed to have the opportunity to work in a space where one can experience the silence of a sacred space. .

“ The only wisdom we can hope to attain is humility, humility is endless” –T.S.Eliot

Fondly

Geeta Ramanujam

 

Story in pics

A glimpse of Kathalayas 2009. Please visit our Online Photo Gallery to view more images.

Test your story IQ

The Storytellers Trail

Check out how you score on the stories of past and the present

1. What is the first chapter of the Panchatantra?

2. In the story of the Lion and the Jackal, in Panchatantra, which animal does the lion adopt?

Answers

1.Mitra Bheda(Loss of friends)
2. Camel

On the other side of life…….

After a long tjme all of us at KATHALAYA traveled to Koppal to train the Self Help Groups of Women –SHGS as they call it. There were nearly 318 such groups there and they were all eager as in any other small villages and towns to uplift the status of life at the community level and raise the literacy levels. We all took turns to travel and train them at varied levels.

There were many young men too who also presented stories of the atrocities in the taluk and district levels in an intelligent humorous way. There were many women like Mallika who were subjugated to child marriage. It was alarming to know that this day and age that she had been married at the age of 6 to her uncle who was 10 and even before she had consummated the marriage he had died.

She is a strong activist now against child marriage and lives ironically with her mother and grandmother cum mother in law.

We also had the opportunity to meet another set of tribal teachers at the Kodikanal hills above Madurai, in Southern India. Known as Pallars and other OBC’s they were similar to the tribals we had interacted at Orissa. They were some of the best storytellers that I had witnessed in recent times. They just grasped the whole essence of the training in a trice.

On the second day at the training center at Pannaikadu half way to Kodikanal Hills we were having breakfast and we heard them practicing the sounds and doing voice exercises with great enthusiasm. The story presentations in Tamil were brilliant. They jumped and moved like animals and birds and created a lot of sensitive stories about the moon, flowers and trees coupled with songs and musical instruments. After the workshop two of us went up to Kodikanal and took a quiet peaceful walk through the ‘Coakers Walk strip’ reflecting their stories watching the clouds silently envelop the mountains below amidst the quiet bird calls…

Geeta Ramanujam

Story of the Month

Your story

Clever Manka.....South Indian folk tale

Once upon a time there lived a poor shepherd and a greedy farmer. The farmer would always tie up the sheep that strayed into his field. The shepherd and the farmer would get into an argument. The poor shepherd lost a lot of his sheep this way. .

One day Gopal overheard the shouting and screaming between them and stopped in his tracks. “Let me solve your dispute by asking you to answer three riddles”, he said. Both the shepherd and the farmer agreed to abide. .

“What is the swiftest thing in the world?”
“What is the sweetest thing in the world?”
“Who is the richest in the world?”

He gave them a day to ponder.
The dull farmer asked his wife to help him out with the answers. The wife who was equally haughty, answered in a flash.
“Our horse is the swiftest!”
“Our honey is the sweetest!”
“Our treasure chest with gold coins proves that we are the richest!”
The farmer was delighted.
The shepherd arrived home discouraged and sad. He had a daughter, a clever girl named Manka, who met him at the door and asked, “What is it, Father?”

The shepherd narrated the dispute he had had with the farmer and told her about the three riddles. There was a twinkle in Manka’s eyes as she began to think.

The next day …..
The shepherd and the farmer arrived at Gopal’s house.
The farmer gave the answers to the riddles as told by his wife.
Now all eyes were set on the shepherd, who said
“The swiftest thing in the world is thought, for it can run any distance in the twinkling of an eye.”
“The sweetest thing of all is sleep, for when a man is tired and sad, what could be sweeter?”
“The richest thing is the earth, for out of earth comes all the other riches.”

A scintillating Re-run

"Hurry! Finish up your plate. Otherwise, you will have to miss it today" cautioned my mother whose agenda was to finish the dinner business early. We gasped and stopped our chatter to attack our food. Missing this serial was not an option. If we did, however would we know, what happened to the hero of the story? What tricks did he do to defeat the dirty villian? That he would win, we were sure. Well, you know, Good always wins. We had been waiting all day for the serial

Having done with the dinner and forced to brush our teeth, we ran to "HEAR" the rest of the serial story. In the background came our mothers caution that we had to stop the serial strictly in half an hour.

No, the location was not the couch in front of the telly. It was inside the mosquito net of our grandfather, the one man artist of our childhood serials. We tucked ourselves in, me nad my brother, impatient to hear the rest. He was as impatient as us to tell the rest. and he started exactly from where he had stopped. He was a mean lion one minute, growling and the very next, he transformed into God, giving one of those crafty Rakshasas an immpossible boon. Very soon, he was an entire army chasing the demons with the most unimaginable missiles

We had something to say on each line and he continued the story without missing a beat. By the end of the session, if we were not so intoxicated by the story to have fallen asleep, we were alive with excitement to listen to the next part of the story which was being rerun for the millionth time!

That was the joy of our serials of childhood

Meera Venkatesan

We invite you to share your stories with us. Please write to us at kathalaya@gmail.com

The House of stories

Kathalaya is a very vibrant house. Here we believe in constant interaction and learning sessions. If you have anything interesting that you would like to see scheduled here, please write to us at kathalaya@gmail.com Please visit our web site at www.Kathalaya.org to know more about us.
Phone numbers:
91-80-26689856, 9845207073, 9986244808  

Kathalaya thanks

The founders and trustees of Kathalaya, the children, schools and NGO’s who have helped us grow into an instititution in the last ten years.

Bhuvaneswari Lakshminarayana and Jyotika Dwarakanath for volunteering for Kathalaya at all times.

Sumathi Ravichander Principal Vagdevi Vilas schools

Mayuri Parameshwaran Principal and Director-Jingle Bells school for translating the story cards into Tamil

Gayathri Kumaraswamy Freedom International school for translating the story cards into Tamil

Uma Srinivasan Principal, Ashok Leyland School- Hosur

Nagalakshmi Devaraj Despite her health continues to serve in Kathalaya

Lata Satagopanfor her continued support

Rekha Kapoor, Our new and Lively Resource person

Ylva Gustaffson Culture Ministry -Vastra Gotland-WesternSweden

Meera Venkatesan who has volunteered to compile our newsletter "The story hour" and maintains our website

Deeptha for taking up the Kathalaya Franchaise in Chennai

Special thanks to Aid India, The Kishkinda Trust, Sampark, Arundathi Nag ( Ranga Shankara) and Kirtana Kumar (Theater Lab)

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Please let us know your feedback at kathalaya@gmail.com