Hi protagonist. Welcome to your story.
once upon a time
there was a story it did not have a
happy ending
i’m sorry that was quite a sad start i
know
but it’s true isn’t it there have been
so many stories with
so many once upon a times that haven’t
had
a happy ending not yet at least like
you’re watching one right in front of
you i’ve
always been confused when somebody asked
me
uh who are you or what do you do or if
the inquiry is a little true they ask
what are you i mean what do you even
reply to that what do you as a general
question would reply to that
i’m a mother i’m a father i’m a son
i’m a sales executive i’m a dentist
i’m a manager i’m a doctor i’m an
engineer
i’m a depressed and unemployed person
i’m really sorry for the correlation
between the last two or three examples
but you get my chest don’t you
we’ve all been guilty of this we’ve all
been guilty
of you know reducing our enlightenment
and our experiences and our lived life
examples
to a male profession or a relation
but when i first spoke the first
sentence of this vlog
once upon a time you did not care about
who i was or what i did you expected
something
your shoulders relaxed a bit your mind
wandered
and you expected me to set a scene
weave a plot reveal some characters
you expected me to tell a story and you
were quite nice about
it because at the very
crux of all of us we are
essentially all stories
we are all a story but how exactly
stories have been inherently linked to
the human civilization
human beings have always been attached
to stories and we have always been
telling them
so of course they might not always be so
well drafted and so thrilling
uh neanderthal granting good fat
dinner nights in myanmar language of
course
would not make a new york times
bestseller but
he or she still told the story we have
always been telling stories to us
and to each other since history itself
in fact stories outdate history
and stories in my personal opinion are
even more important than signs of
philosophy because at the end of the day
what is history or science or philosophy
but just another story history is a
story that we remember
science is a story that we can verify
and philosophy is a story that makes us
think
at the end of the day essentially we’re
all stories
but why exactly are stories so important
what makes stories the building block of
our civilization of our culture
it’s very very simple really it’s
because
we connect to them we feel them
we go away with them we escape with them
we
attach ourselves to them do you remember
the exact details of the
first time your mother sent you a
lullaby
do you remember the first time you read
a poem or a story in your kindergarten
do you remember the time spent in your
grandmother’s veranda reading a jump up
or a merchant
if you’re a teenager do you remember the
time spent on the internet reading new
young adult gnomes if you’re elder than
me do you remember the time when you
were a middle-aged person and you
remembered
the stories in your newspaper that made
you wonder or that
made you apprehensive about the
situations in our country
if you’re a senior citizen if you’re way
older than me
do you remember the time when you were a
kid and your stories were so much better
than us
there are good chances that you don’t
remember that
not the exact details of course but you
do remember the stories
you do you remember the feelings you
attached to them you do remember the
emotions
that you associated with a particular
world with a particular phrase
and that is what stories are capable of
they are capable of making us relive
any particular time they’re capable of
making us
really love any particular emotion
if you craft a scene well enough even
the most
stone-hearted of a person can fall in
love with a fictional
lover if you set the scene with enough
details
the most gen z or millennial person in
2020
can go back and solve crimes in a
victorian englishman
that is the power of stories though they
can make you go to a whole new world
they can make you follow up with a whole
new place
but most importantly they can help you
explore the emotions
inside of you that you never even knew
existed
a person in philadelphia can go back and
drive
because a person investing palestine
poem
you know if you sit down and you just
read stories
nisha’s absurdities of the entire
universe would seem
plain as day to you and if you sit back
and read stories again
newton’s simplification of the entire
world
would just be on the back of your head
that
my friend is department of stories and
we are here to discover that
now i told you why we love stories we
love stories because they make us feel
we love stories because they let us
explore ourselves we love stories
because they allow us to escape
from this world that we live in but the
greatest reason why we love stories
is because we love telling them
i mean go back to all the stories that
you thought were close to you or you
thought were
warm or you thought were inspiring and
find out
i think you would find out that there
were all stories that
told us what somebody else fell to what
somebody else achieved or what somebody
else endured
the underdog winning the championship
man walking on the moon
an innocent person from jail making a
dating escape
a racks which is billionaire and under
talented guy giving a ted talk
these are stories that are close to us
as human beings
because we are innately optimistic at
heart
we want to believe that the best can
happen
and we want to tell our own stories so
that we know that we did our best
if i ask you right now how did you fall
in love
would you tell me on the internet or
would you
share a little detail about how you sent
a joke to somebody
and they acted coily about it pretended
that they didn’t understand but they
sent the joke back
and the two of you started sharing a
little love a little inside joke of your
own and that led to
a good time again
if you ask me right now am i close to my
grandfather
i can’t believe you yes i am or i can
tell you the time that
we spend together
[Music]
now of course all these stories prove
that we as human beings love telling
these stories
because we won’t comment we want an
escape
we want a place where we can put out our
own emotions
our own fears our own vulnerabilities
our own aspirations our own dreams
and yet be perfectly sane about it and
yet feel perfectly
safe about it that is what stories
provide us
a platform to be ourselves
of course human beings are infinitely
complex
we are a very difficult a very different
accumulation
of so many feelings of so many emotions
but stories give us a way to sort that
out to
simplify it and that is why i have
always been fascinated with stories so
much so that it has made me
i am but i didn’t tell you
who i am right i
am a story like any other story
i have cliches and you can make the
writer up there for all the lack of
inspiration
but it’s quite a story though
i did not have a very normal childhood
so as to say
of course how many indian children have
a normal childhood
but to keep me company i had people who
were way less than normal than me
mr and mrs dursley of number four
private drive were very proud to say
that they were perfectly normal
thank you very much that’s the first
line
of the book series that i started
reading since i was 10 years old
i did not have many friends but harry
potter hermione ranger
and normal beastly kept me company all
through those years
my family did not go out to my
notifications but every summer
i spent at either hogwarts or narnia
or camp half blood and every summer i
grew up to be
a kind of a more confident and a more
developed person than i was a year
before
only because i had stories to guide of
course
since i wanted to be a writer and i was
born in an indian household
i was asked to give the engineering
english exams deep down
i knew it was wrong and therefore deep
down in my engineering books i kept dan
brown’s classics to keep me happening
in that news the inferno there is a line
borrowed from dante’s
divine comedy the darkest places in hell
are reserved for those who maintain
their neutrality
in times of modern crisis when i as a 16
year old read that
it hit me so much that i still carry
that vote with me to this day
it has given me courage to face a more
400 armed people when i was defending a
movement
and the people in whom i believed very
much
it has given me the courage to write
about things that i thought were
important to write about
of course right from the very beginning
right from my childhood i have kept my
pen company
and my heart hopeful i’ve written
anywhere and everywhere that i could
write but the results were mixed
my readership included a couple of
friends that
sat with me at the jaipur harbour that
is the t stones
my mother who was very generous to read
my writings even though she knew they
were not very nice at the time
and of course a couple of internet
friends this was back in class 11
by the time my college is about to be
over
three or four years later i have now
written in eight
national international media houses and
my leadership every day reaches about
five or six million
how does that happen with the hint of
descriptive stories
two teenage kids had an idea when they
were scribbling on the back of their
notebooks
hey others might also want to scribble
on the back of their notebooks
why not create something that would
allow us to share our writings and allow
them to share theirs
it would be a nice idea they say it
would only be a small page though they
also said
how wrong they were on the second part
oman and mohit created a platform for
people
who believed in their writing and who
wanted to put their word out
but because um mathematics mark she said
otherwise
they believed in their own idea they
believed in their guts and they created
india’s largest storytelling platform of
course
when i was a school kid to be part of
something that
huge impacted me a lot
it gave me the idea that my writings
could also make a difference
that i could also change things just
with my words
and that allowed me to become the best
version of myself
of course i’m still enrolled in an
engineering position
think of that just as a filler chapter i
have become
much more since my since my association
with the student studies since my
association with writing literature
i have become a writer at india’s
largest community platform i have a
leadership of six million people
i have participated activities at the
national international level i’ve
represented
but more than any of that despite any of
that or including any of that
that does not describe who i am at the
core are the crux of it all
i am a storyteller i love stories
because
they enable me to belong in a world that
is simply so diverse and so complicated
that it would otherwise make us all
strangers
i love telling stories but more than
that i love reading stories
i love hearing stories and there is one
story that i am dying
yours of course i love stories and there
are so many reasons for that
but if you ask me to tell you the
particular reasons
i can tell you the dialogue stories
because they create an entire
new world for me to escape into i can
tell you that i love stories because
they allow me to feel emotions that i’ve
never failed before
i can tell you that i love stories
because they allow me to talk about
things
that other people won’t talk about or
that other people
would not know but that
just won’t be the complete truth
stories make us stories
allow us to create our own reality if
i’m writing a story i can be a queer
superhero
or i can be a mafia godfather basis with
if i’m writing my story i can be my true
my complete self without ever feeling
one group
i can tell how my cast made me feel
suffocated in my classroom
but i could tell how my parents divorce
really made
me feel as a tragic young child i could
tell
how fictional my love poems for a
classmate would
but i could simply tell how i was
feeling in a particular day which was
ordinary for all aspects other than
thoughts of mine
i can make a story come to life only
because
stories gave me that and stories are
powerful
i’m a very ordinary person there is no
particular reason why
i would become a better writer than you
but
a lot of people do not tell their
stories they do not tell their stories
because they see
people who won’t read it they do not
tell their stories because
people would not find it artistic enough
or creative enough or brilliant enough
or popular enough but that is just
hopeless nobody has ever lived your life
nobody has ever experienced your
experiences
nobody has ever found out the truths
that you did
and therefore nobody can get yours
so if you find it in your heart to pick
up a pen
or to find your mind and to tell your
truths
your experiences your association with
the word that we have here
you would find that your story won’t be
alone in the world
and neither would you you would find a
place to belong
and you would find the power to be the
one in charge of your own soul
at the beginning of this talk i said
that i am a story which i am
but i also said that i did not have a
happy ending which of course i didn’t
i’m just not ready to write my ending
there’s so many chapters get to read
there’s so many emotions yet to feel
that there’s so many
ways in which i want to experience light
itself
before i write the final word of myself
i always live by one module but i
write my story of b1
if you’re brave enough to tell your
story to the world
to be wonderful enough to put yourself
out there and get strong enough to
create your own reality
i’m pretty sure that you will write your
story
or be one two thank you so much