The origin of Story Telling
hi my name is shashank
and i’m an actor i also make music and
films for a living thank you so much to
i am rotha for the invite to speak today
on your subject which is uh
or your theme which is a my read of of
mo’s
it’s my pleasure to speak to students um
firstly i just want to
begin by saying it’s been a difficult
year for all of us
um 2020 has been perhaps the toughest
year that i
that i’ve lived through in my life so i
hope
the batch of 2020 is holding strong and
i hope you realize that uh
this year uh is perhaps
something that will teach you uh about
life more than
any other year could have and uh i hope
you take it uh
in your stride and uh you realize that
the challenges that have been thrown by
2020 20
will equip you for the rest of your life
and i hope this year has taught us
empathy
and sensitivity and reminded us that
life is short
and that we need to live with compassion
and
love which is the most important thing
so let’s move on to my brief talk today
about storytelling
um let’s
start by the fact that today if you’re
watching this i don’t know where
you’re watching this from if you’re
watching this at home or if you’re
sitting in an auditorium
or you’re at a friend’s place or you’re
watching this on
your phone um no matter where you are
[Music]
[Music]
stories
these are all forms of storytelling and
storytelling is perhaps the most
prevalent of human behaviors that exists
along with eating and
making love and sleeping and so
storytelling is something that exists
all around us in many different forms
and shapes today
and let me
just uh for 20 seconds
[Music]
[Music]
so many different thoughts are going
through everyone’s head while they’re
listening to this song
now this is listening to this tune um
and all these different thoughts are
coming from the people you
are and if perhaps you discuss these
thoughts with the person next to you
you will find that even though
you are very different people with very
different experiences
there will be a certain commonality in
the thoughts you had when you were
listening to this song
and that commonality is uh people and
emotions and places
so um in a nutshell what i am trying to
say
is that stories uh have taken on so many
different forms and effects these days
uh that it’s easier for us to feel
divided uh by stories more than united
um storytelling exists in in
kathakali and opera in north theater
from japan
in russian theater in
hollywood musicals in karnatakas
in delhi in in so many films in dances
in in sculpture in painting in
literature of course
these are all different mediums through
which we tell stories
and it’s easy to get lost in all these
mediums and it’s easy to find
our niche and something we like and it’s
easy to
uh separate ourselves from another
person
in our choice of of preferred choice of
storytelling
uh but um
i want to go into the origin of
storytelling just for
a minute um to perhaps uh
challenge this sense of division we feel
when we listen to stories sometimes and
these days stories are being told to us
sometimes to divide us
storytelling is also being used as a
tool to divide people
and unfortunately we need to identify
that as fast as we can
and you being students you are the
future of
our planet and uh there is nobody better
than you to fight this fight
of trying to unite the world and so
um i want to go back a thousand years
um i want to go back to our religious
texts
to uh to the greek myths to uh
chinese folklore um so if we um
we look at these texts so we find
of course apart from the obvious
cultural differences
uh and the geographical differences and
the differences in language
and phonetics we find that perhaps there
are more similarities
than differences uh a lot of the myths a
lot of religious scriptures a lot of
the epics as we call them a lot of them
are about kings
a lot of them about lovers a lot of them
about families being broken
a lot of them are about uh living a
peaceful life a lot of them are about
uh our relationship with animals our
relationship with
nature um so our stories
uh in a nutshell even though they’re
very different from each other
um they do carry the same
emotional parameters because the people
who are telling these stories are human
beings
and so let’s dive a little further back
um
to a few thousand years before these
uh stories came to be uh
that we call the greek myths or the
greek tragedies or the chinese folklore
um let’s go back uh uh
many thousands of years before that
we as a species uh
came up with storytelling not as a
medium to entertain each other
or to educate each other or to
show our craft as much as storytelling
was a survival mechanism
so imagine with me if
let’s go back 40 000 years ago and we’re
living in a cave
we’re all together in one cave and
two people from our cave go to collect
fruits
and only one comes back to the cave
later at night
[Music]
there would be no way for that one
person to explain to the whole tribe
what happened to the other person unless
he tells
them a story of what happened unless he
or she
tells the tribe that we crossed the
river
and across the river there was a bear
and the bear attacked
my friend and my friend was killed
and i ran because i was scared and i
came back to the cave
unless i tell this to my tribe my tribe
has no way of knowing
if i killed my friend or what happened
or where the danger lies or where the
food lies
so storytelling was a way for us to
communicate to one another
simple events storytelling is a way for
us to make
sense of the world around us and
i find comfort in the fact that this
gives us a common origin
to storytelling around the world and
what this explains to us is that human
beings can only relate to
events in a certain way with love with
anger with
jealousy with sadness
and so um eventually these stories
they moved from an oral tradition to uh
cave paintings like the french cave
paintings from 30 000 years ago
to carvings on stone uh to dies
on on a cloth made from animals
to theater and poetry
to uh literature with incon on papyrus
to a cinema and when social media came
to the internet stuff like tweets and
insta stories and uh of course our books
and
our literature so even though
storytelling
took on so many so many different forms
and mediums
along this thousand thousand thousand
thousand year old journey it’s easy for
us to feel
segregated by the stories and the story
telling themselves it’s easy for us to
find differences
within one another but it’s very
important for us to know
why we started telling stories and
why we started telling stories was to
understand one another
and that should highlight to us the fact
that we are not very different from one
another
um our stories are always about the same
things
irrespective of where we are from if
you’re a kid born in russia
and you watch and a bollywood film on
mute it still affects you
it still affects your feelings if you’re
from india and you watch
an american a hollywood film tomorrow
you still relate to that or if you read
a piece of poetry written by an
australian author
that poetry still affects you or
if you watch a dance
from latin america
like this you know like the salsa that
dance still affects you you still feel
moved
so um it’s
it’s very important for us to realize as
people that we are not very different
from one another even though we come in
many different shapes form sizes and
colors
storytelling itself is uh is proof
of the fact that human beings originated
in
a common circumstance that human beings
go through very similar um
mindsets that human beings experience
uh very similar feelings um
so in these days in today’s time um i
think it’s been 10 minutes
since i’ve been talking uh i just want
to
highlight the fact that no matter where
you’re from
no matter who you are and what your name
is and what your parents do or
what you like and what you don’t like
you and the person in front of you
share much more in common than than you
can anticipate
and
i think that is something we as human
beings need to uh
carry with us for the rest of our lives
um and that for us solves many a
conundrum
and that’s all surah’s many a moral
problem and
storytelling is the origin of
storytelling is a subject that
experts are very divided on because like
the origin of language
it requires a very layered approach but
what we do know like i told you
is that we perhaps share a common origin
and uh
i hope those commonalities they affect
us much more than our differences and i
hope we respect our differences
and acknowledge our commonalities and uh
i hope we can make this a a better world