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