Author Archives: Story Practices

On your career journey?

I was born and brought up in Delhi. I did my school and collage from Delhi. After doing my post-graduation in Mass Communication from Delhi University, I did my first media internship at Transasia’s Swagat. I then joined Hindustan Times, Dainik Jagaran, Rashtriya Sahara and Amar Ujala. These are Hindi publications and Hindi newspapers. I then worked with the Electronic Media production centre of IGNOU. I joined AIR as a newsreader. Then, I got married and moved to Singapore where I worked at DAV Hindi School. I did a few shows in Singapore on Indian Diaspora. After that, I started working with a website called Inside Sport. Then we moved to the US. After coming back, I joined a Hindi Business news platform, Entrackr. Business was not my forte. For most of my career, I had worked in Art and Culture and Education and Career. In 2018, I started my journey into storytelling. I loved the mic and being on stage. When we moved back from the US, I used to teach social skills to my daughter through storytelling. In the global context, stories are used to teach children in the US, UK and Europe. I started writing social stories to cover topics like hygiene and puberty. The social stories can be a very good medium to teach special needs kids lot of things. When we moved to India, I wanted to take these stories to all the kids who needed this. The question was ‘how is it possible?’ I had an experience of working in radio. I tried to use that. I believe in telling stories of real life characters. When I had to teach my daughter, social skills, I used to make stories with real life characters.

During one of the online session,when I narrated the story about hygiene to the girls, the response was very good. I started telling more stories by joining online events during Covid.

I realised that storytelling is something which I am enjoying. I got associated with  lot of storytelling associations in India to know more and more about storytelling. I am in a resource panel of publications like NBT, which has given me an opportunity to perform in events like World book fair and Doon book fair.

I have been privileged to be a part of summer camp in  Rashtrapati Bhavan at New Delhi. My storytelling has given me an opportunity to perform in festivals like Kala Ghoda in Mumbai.

I love writing for kids which inspired me to be a part of 3 anthologies so far.

I love theatre and music and recently I have started pursuing my hobbies.

Do you think being in the media is different from being in storytelling?

When I joined the media, I was already into reading and music. I used to cover art amd culture events for different publications so I was kind of already doing storytelling. Because of this I could not see much difference between being in the media and storytelling. When I was a child, I used to tell a lot of stories. I still remember I used to send many stories to newspapers. There was always a storyteller in me from the very beginning. On Sundays, I would read the newspaper to my father. I used to read comics like Archies and Diamond comics in Hindi. Like any other 90s kid, my childhood was full of memories of different kids magazines like Nandan, champak and nanhe samrat.

Could you talk about the need for regional storytelling?

Once I got an opportunity to co-judged a festival . There were lot of Storytellers who had gathered there from different parts of India. The thing I noticed was, lots of participants were narrating a story in English. But I was happy to see that lots of kids did narrate in Assamese, Bangla, Odiya. Surprisingly, most of the kids from northern India narrated in English. They were doing it in other languages and I was so touched that they were not concerned with the judging and the parents encouraged the children to narrate the stories in regional languages or in their own mother tongue. Often in other places, very few tellers are comfortable in telling stories in their mother tongue. Adult storytelling is often in English.

As far as I am concerned, Hindi is my expressive language. For me, Hindi is the language I am more comfortable with.

क्या आप हिंदी स्टोरीटेलिंग के बारे मैं बात कर सकती है?

मैं प्रेमचन्द, शिवानी, अमृता प्रीतम और अन्य कई लेखकों की किताबें पड़ती थी।  जब मैं स्टोरीटेलिंग में आयी तब मैंने देखा कि जब मैं हिंदी साहित्य की कहानियां बच्चों को पढ़ाती हूँ तो वह बच्चों को बहुत अच्छी लगती है।

पर मेरा ये भी मानना है कि अभी भी बच्चों के साहित्य में बहुत कुछ करना बाकी है। सम्भावनाएँ अनंत है। आजकल इस दिशा में बहुत काम हो रहा है, ऐसे कई publications हैं जो बच्चों के लिए काम कर रहें हैं

क्या आप बता सकती है की स्टोरीटेलिंग की दुनिया में क्या चल रहा है?

जैसा कि मैंने अभी बताया, आजकल कई publications जैसे प्रथम बुक्स, एकतारा बच्चों के लिए काम कर रहें हैं। इसके अलावा बच्चों की कई magazines भी आने लगी हैं। social media की वजह से children’s literature का प्रचार प्रसार बढ़ चला है। schools भी इस दिशा में काफ़ी काम कर रहें हैं। organizations जैसे NBT, भी इस दिशा में बहुत काम कर रहें हैं

अभी कुछ समय पहले मुझे एक प्रतियोगिता में co-judge बनने का मौका मिला पर दुर्भाग्य की बात ये थी कि कई बच्चों ने CHAT GPT के इस्तेमाल से कहानियां लिखी थींl मेरा मानना है ऐसी कहानियों में भावनाओं की कमी होती है। कोई भी टेक्नोलॉजी,मानवीय संवेदनाओं की जगह नहीं ले सकती।

If you ask me about the importance of storytelling, I think any form of performing art – storytelling, theatre, music or dance, is needed for children. Anything that connects them to nature and culture or give them a chance to express themselves is important.

क्या आप कहानियां सुनाते समय कोई कलेक्शंस को सोर्स की तरह देखती है?

मेरे लिए real life characters ही ठीक हैं। कई बार ऐसा होता है कि जो कहानी मेरे मन में होती है वो मुझे  ऑडियंस को देखने के बाद सही नहीं लगती और फिर मैं वहीँ मन में सोच कर कुछ बना डालती हूं।

क्या आप अपने थिएटर एक्सपीरियंस के बारे में बता सकती है?

मेरा शुरू से ही आर्ट एंड कल्चर की ओर झुकाव था। यूं कहिए theater मेरे लिए खुली आंखों से देखा एक सपना था।

Storytelling के अपने सफ़र के दौरान ही मुझे एक थिएटर ग्रुप  ज्वाइन करने का मौका मिला। हम कह सकते हैं, मैंने  अपने  आप  को  थिएटर के माध्यम से जाना और पहचाना। मेरा  पहला  प्ले  गांधारी  था। 2023  में  मैंने  थिएटर  ज्वाइन  किया। मेरा पहला नाटक गांधारी mythology और आज के समय का एक अनोखा मेल था। theater मेरे लिए अभिव्यक्ति का माध्यम है और मुझे जीवंत रखता है।

The history of Indian storytelling and the great Indian quest for moksham starts with an unbroken tradition of worshipping the Great Goddess, the Mother Goddess and Shakti or the Goddess as the serpent power in the spine of the yogini or yogi.

In India, storytelling rose with many tales serving the gods of Moksha or Nirvana. In India, since time memorable people sought Nirvana from mundane existence (samsara sagara) from the varied paths, texts and traditions available for them.

Watching Deepa Kiran perform once is an enlightening experience. But to watch her perform the same story twice is a process of renewal and revival. I first watched Ramayana in a folktale by Deepa Kiran, renowned international storyteller and storytelling teacher, whose style is so genuine and embellished with rare understanding and insights into Indic thought, during the Indica Storytelling Conference in December 2022. The second performance was her rendition of the “Ramayana in a folktale” in her youtube channel which she maintains with care and affection for a vast audience who turn to it for inner nourishments. The performance which is a reflection of what is culture and why in a country where there is so much traditional art form many of us still miss out on the “essential culture of the Ramayana itself.” The story is a metaphor for how the Ramayana is central to the Indian cultural context and yet remains alien to many Indians who have chosen samsara over nirvana. Also, the story is a take on how the rasa experience of the traditional storyteller can be a hilarious process of confusion for the non convert to the cultural spaces of India.

Arabian Nights or Thousand and One Nights is retold and understood in a manner that is at once contemporary and irresistible. Narrated in Tamil by scholar Dr. R Lakshmi Priya it is at once taking us back into the history of storytelling and into the magic of classic storytelling collections. Arabian Nights is the story of many stories narrated with a strikingly startling story frame. In this storytelling in Brio TV Dr. R Laksmi Priya narrates the frame story of Arabian Nights and analyses it in the context of current post colonial understanding of the western gaze and orientalisms. The analysis tells us that these western translations of Arabian Nights that are available to us must be written incorrectly in their highly demeaning portrayal of women. The protagonist and chief storyteller of the 1001 nights in Sheherazade, herself a wonderful and brave women risks her life for the sake of other women. Welcome to Keladi Kanmani of Brio TV with Dr. R Lakshmi Priya.

A very, very profound storyteller Dr. R. Lakshmi Priya also narrated the story of Satyavan and Savitri wherein Savitri tricks Yama, the god of Death into returning her husband Satyavan back into the world of living.