‘Storytelling is the ability to connect at deeply emotional level with another person’, says Deeptha Vivekanand

How did you become a storyteller?

It was a day at work and I was browsing stuff, because I was in corporate learning and development, there was a fair amount of reading up, looking at learning methods etc. That’s how I came across storytelling. After chancing upon it, first I realised how common yet unexplored it was. Then I read about the idea of learning storytelling as a teaching methodology. I also came back to the days when my grandmother used to share stories with me. I realised how storytelling was a big part of growing up for me. After this realisation, I approached prominent storytellers in the field, took training and slowly started performing.

How do people react when you tell them about what you do?

I have this scanned line, “I am a storyteller. It is not a con job, somebody actually pays me to do this.” I still get it, because it’ll continue to be offbeat, it will continue to be sort of, eyebrow raising. I also get asked a lot, “are you a writer?” Therefore, you learn to deal with it and in the process you also end up explaining a lot and it will continue to be like this. The younger generation is more aware of this thanks to open mics.

How would you explain storytelling to a lay person?

I think at its core, storytelling is the ability to connect at a deeply emotional level with another person who is a complete stranger. That is the essence of storytelling and everything else is built around that. So as a storyteller, you have to think about ways to build that connection. Different tools including words, actions, people’s participation, expression and body language – these form the fence around which the story will sit.

I tend to steer more towards folklore because there is a wealth of content available there, and I grew up on it. One of my missions is to revive these folktales and contemporarise them. That’s also where my skill lies, being able to take a written piece of text and convert it into a performance. Because you can’t simply narrate the text. I like to call it the “magnificence about the mundane”.

How did your company Ever After get started and what do you aim to do with it?

I started Ever After because I wanted to formalise what I was doing, give it shape and form. Before Ever After, I was doing a lot of ad hoc work. One of my aims was also to engage with schools. This meant using stories in a curriculum, in other words, taking a story and connecting it to various concepts in that subject. I was conscious about one thing during this time, which was that I didn’t want to do it only for the very young children, that is again a myth behind storytelling – that it is only for children.

How has your experience been with working with schools?

While I was in Bangalore, we were able to take storytelling to a lot of schools. We integrated stories into the curriculum, especially in social sciences – we worked with classes from the 6th to the 10th grade. It was challenging to work with the older ones because they are so jaded by the education system and they are suspicious of your intentions.

Stories are able to make subjects like history and geography more interesting. There was a curriculum we ran about teaching history, which Peaceworks allowed us to run. It was about the partition of India into Pakistan and Bangladesh. We looked at some of the literature that was written at the time and brought about a nuanced understanding of those texts. A lot of this happened after Nisha [Nisha Abdulla, her partner in Ever After] came on board.

Can you explain the process of building a storytelling classroom curriculum?

We take topics from grades 1-5, look at the broad topics, map those to a story, and based on the story create lesson plans, and then try to bring in inter-subject linkages. Therefore, you’re not looking at a story purely from a language perspective for instance, there maybe a math component in it as well.

For example, if there’s a story about tangrams (a dissection puzzle made of shapes) – a lot of ancient Chinese stories are based on tangrams. While that could be an interesting story in itself, when you’re doing geometry, you can use it as a trigger to talk about triangles. Therefore, while studying triangles in geometry, you’re not just looking at a shape, but can know about its relevance in the world. Therefore, before understanding the subject simply as a chapter, you can get an outside view. That’s what narrative helps you do, it opens up the canvas for you.

Where else does storytelling fit in?

Businesses use stories to connect with their consumers, which is mainly through advertisements. Some examples are Amazon, Titan and Flipkart. Other than this, they can use it internally, within the company, for example a manager can use different methods to become more persuasive, or do presentations in a more interesting way. The crux is, using an idea to communicate effectively. It comes down to breaking it down to smaller processes.