Stories and their tellers
They say a good story shouldn’t let the truth get in its way. I feel a good story gets better with an element of truth in it. Be it any language, region or culture, the prose should somehow weave itself in such a manner that it reaches a higher plane of relatability. Failing which, words fall short of their original task. No matter what happens, the emerging story must connect us. People laugh at good jokes but they go crazy at the best ones. Maybe because the finest jokes are built on the shoulders of our realities and when we LOL hard at them, we are basically LOL-ing harder at ourselves.
That’s the challenge.
A similar construct is prevalent in storytelling too. When a storyteller picks up a topic and plays the characters around so as to reach a conclusion (eventually), he is trying to bait us in to an emotional rapture. It’s presumably a slow process because humans take time to relate or connect. Even a shorter-than-short story needs time and the correct frame of mind. But the process, if carried out with panache, would compel you to be a part of the yarn. As the story progresses, you’ll see yourself seeing yourself in a character/s’ place. When you first heard the story of Romeo and Juliet regardless of how young or old you were, you somewhere found yourself in either of their shoes. What would have you done differently? You certainly wouldn’t have killed yourself in such a haste.
Therein hides the manipulative power of storytelling.
It pulls you toward its centre of gravity before making home in your head. In simple words, it fucks with you. You know none of those stories are real. They might be sucking on the nipples of truth but the end product is mostly tilted towards myth and legends. That’s what all stories are made up of. It’s impossible to see things the way they are and it’s more impossible to tell it the way it is. The complimentary drama is as essential to the art of storytelling as it is to ensuring that truth suffers.
A good storyteller knows this. A great storyteller knows how to overcome it.
Since we are on my favourite topic, let me share a story with you:
There was a boy named Selva and he had only one dream. He wanted to establish world peace. In his village, people neither knew what the world was about nor had ever enjoyed the fruits of peace. There was always chaos in the air. Amid this tension, our tiny hero continued to harbour his sweet little project. World peace. Kids his age kept themselves distracted with eating mud, counting stars and burning ants but Selva stayed focused. He knew what he wanted.
[10 years later]
Selva works as a mechanic in a dusty city and has understood very well that world peace is quite easy to attain when you shrink your world to an individual called you. He is quite happy and doesn’t believe in harvesting futile dreams anymore.
Somebody asked him recently, “Do you remember the first dream you ever saw?” He could have said yes because he did but he said no because some dreams are best left in the past.
