Everything's Official About This

The workshop is over. Phew. That’s one thing ticked off on my ‘to do’ list! I was wondering if I should take it up at all because managing preteens and teens is not exactly easy, especially when one is increasingly beginning to resemble a penguin. I wasn’t sure if I could stand continuously and talk all day without developing some scary pregnancy related syndrome.

But I’m glad I decided to do it. Thankfully, the organizers (Katha, Delhi) were mostly female and sympathetic to my almost-eight-months pregnant self running backstage once in a while and munching on something.

There were 350 children in all. Some as small as Class IV and some as big as Class X. The point of the workshop was to discuss the basic elements that go into story writing and encourage the children to be original and have the courage to write about their own lived experiences. At the end of the workshop, they were to participate in a story writing contest and the winning stories would be published in a Katha anthology.

In many of the writing activities we did, the children inevitably ended the story with a moral. Even if the stories themselves had a wild side to them,they’d end with a sanctimonious message printed in bold, capital letters. This wasn’t exactly new to me. I’ve seen the same pattern repeated across writing events for children and it really saddens me that their opinion of adults is so low that they feel we’ll only appreciate them if they talk like little wise bores.

I asked the children what sort of books they read and where they got their books from. Most said that they loved adventure and fantasy novels and that they picked up the books themselves from libraries and bookshops. Then,I asked if any of them had ever gone to a library or a bookshop and picked up a moral stories book. Obviously, nobody had ever done that. Then why did they keep writing moral stories? Did they think adults loved reading moral stories? If they did, they wouldn’t buy moral stories and dump it on their children instead of reading them themselves, right? If nobody is interested in reading moral stories, why write them at all? Why not think about writing the kind of books they themselves loved reading? The sort of writing that you can’t stop reading?

It astonishes me how we keep convincing generations of children that they must all be some message-spouting Prahalad types instead of unleashing their incredible reserves of originality. If at all they take the plunge and write a story that’s not obviously moralistic, they can only do so if the story is about some John or Jacob robbing a bank in London. They find it so hard to set a story in a surrounding they know well without turning it into a message about the environment or hard work or something equally didactic. The inability to articulate their own experiences, to see the wealth of stories around themselves, the firm belief that adventures can only happen in Britian….really, what have we done to children? Though this was only to be expected and I’ve seen it happen many times over, I still feel sad about it. I hope the two days helped at least some of them to break free from this self moral policing and write with a free mind, with words they know and understand.

At the end of the workshop, one of the children came to me and asked if I could please, please publish Interval in CM again. I was touched beyond words because Interval is a comic N and I used to do together when we worked there and it was very special to both of us. I was super happy that she remembered it two years since it was last published! I had to tell her that I’d quit and wasn’t doing it any more. Her face fell and she said she’d taken a 3-year subscription for the magazine only for Interval and she was really disappointed we’d stopped doing it! I felt oddly tearful and moved by it all.