‘Katha Kathan’ is not an unusual unknown word for any of us who has grown up listening to many authors since our childhood. In fact Story telling itself is an age old tradition in our culture. Later it became a major technique or tool in Learning and training sessions. It is an interesting way of telling anything in an interesting manner.
Nowadays we have seen that from every corner of the city, story telling has become one of the major performing art. There are frequent story telling sessions either in memory of an author, in memory of a day and there are many such reasons on account of which such programs are happening everywhere. Open Mike story telling is one of the major emerging trend i n today’s scenario.
I can relate this to my involvement in one such Katha Kathan group…. No!! I would rather call it a movement. I said ‘one such’, as the name sounds very common. But there are many more things beyond that ‘common name’. First of all there is a constructive thought behind this and a well thought-out agenda.
It happened so, that during the process of learning Urdu language I met advertising tycoon Mr. Jameel Gulrays who for his love of Urdu language used to record various stories from Urdu literature and upload them on youtube. He used to have story telling sessions for small groups in Mumbai. Later I joined him. One day he told me that because his mother tongue was Urdu, he was reading all Urdu stories. But he was aiming to develop this in every Indian language and wanted storytellers of different Indian regional languages. Thus the concept was further redefined in broader context. I was really fortunate to join him as the very first member of his team.
So far, we have done story telling programs in Urdu, Hindi, Marathi and Bengali. We also have monthly story telling baithaks in various languages. Now Katha Kathan has become a large family of Literature and Language Lovers, Story tellers, Actors, Performers. Glad to see it growing
Jameel Sir always mentions Katha kathan’s journey in Majrooh Sultanpuri’s words …
