Stories – told, texted, typed – have always existed in some form or the other. They come to us from the first of all mouths. They change with every telling. We listen with all our being when we are told stories and we own them when we say them in our own turn.

From simple morality black and white tales, from ditties that spun fear in human heart about gods and punishments and natural calamities, fiction shed its primitive soul to mutate into the current modern genres that dominate the market.

“Stories are the simplest way to get a message across. A format used for thousands of years by the greatest of spiritual masters and scholars, stories are told to teach a lesson, to make a point,” says Reena Puri, editor, Amar Chitra Katha. “Stories apply to all age groups, they are not just for children alone. Every human being responds to a story, it is a natural reflex to pay attention. When we hear the words ‘once upon a time’, we are all ears.”

Stories are vital because they record the history of human emotions – what ails them, why they cry, what they fear and how they overcome these fears. They address a visceral and deeply hidden (perhaps even in our DNA) hysteria that comes from being born knowing we will die.

Stories get a lot done; they delve into the darkest, the murkiest, the unsaid, that what is swept under the carpet. Most of all, they build an imaginary scaffolding to hold in translation our daily minutiae by providing us a beginning, a middle and an ending. There is form and structure, discipline and free verse. Literature is life just as life is literature.

The word, the sentence, the phrase, the paragraph, they all attempt to go beyond the pre-lingual, what is impossible to express. Every attempt is made to recreate existence, a parallel world that spins on an axis in a mirror.

Fairy tales, grandma stories, folk tales, mythology, literary fiction, psychological thrillers, bestsellers, comics, whodunnits… an imagination transfusion that enters our veins like blood.