Stories to hook youth

It was one of those usual rides, a man and his nephew in a car, one driving, the other talking. The nephew - a cousin's son - had never read a story outside his school syllabus. He is an engineer now and preferred listening to music when he drove. The uncle suddenly plugged in a pen drive and there was a story being told - narrated by someone. The nephew began listening, with interest. It happened to be a renowned writer's work and not knowing it, he commented in the end, “This fellow has a good future.” The uncle — G.S. Manoj Kumar - didn't say anything. He was just happy the young fellow finally got interested in a story. And that it later led to a new interest in books. Manoj put many thoughts together and decided that the way to reach out to the younger generation was through a medium they understood — social media. So, after three years of research, he began a YouTube channel called Oridathoridathu with uploads of stories written by newbies and veterans, narrated to the viewer.

Growing up at a time before smartphones Manoj loved reading stories. M Mukundan for him was like Amitabh Bachchan to a star struck fan. There were always books at home. “Both my parents were teachers — mother taught Malayalam and father taught Hindi,” he says. The stories he read stayed in his mind, says Manoj, narrating Thakazhi's 'Avan Varum'. Manoj would often do that — at his office conferences — when they talk of work, he’d relate it to a story. He is the animation director at Twist Digital Media, in Thiruvananthapuram. “There are about 25 animators in the company and when I tell them about these stories they haven’t heard of any. So then I tell them and they'd get hooked. I would get phone calls from one or the other of them, standing at a book fair, asking me the name of the book I told them about. So I realised the possibility of storytelling, it can bring the younger generation back to books.”

There was a huge wealth of good literature in Malayalam and it pained Manoj that these were lying there unnoticed by these young ones. “Parents today — 30 year old ones — don't have the time to tell stories to their kids. But when children hear stories even before they could read, they know that the characters they heard about are coming from books. They'd respect those books, not tear them apart. They’d wait to grab it and read it themselves,” Manoj says.  With all these thoughts, he began the YouTube channel last September, and already has more than 1,200 subscribers and 30,000 views. “Thirty to forty per cent of the stories are from new writers. The rest from veterans like Sethu  (Samayam), Mukundan (Photo), Anand Neelakantan (Vathmeekam), and so on. Our idea was to take stories of living authors so we could hear it in their voice. But Sethu sir and Mukundan sir couldn’t narrate it although they gave us permission to use their stories. And we used the late Padmarajan’s story because his son Ananthapadmanabhan (Pappan) agreed to narrate it. Pappettan has also read two of his own stories.”

“They asked for the stories and I agreed. I think it is a great initiative at a time our story-hearing culture is dying. You don’t hear of grandmom’s night stories anymore. The people hearing the stories needn't be ones who read. They could spend the time they wait at traffic blocks or travel to work every day, to listen to these stories,” Pappan says. The first story he read for the team was Moonu Kathukal (Three Letters), which talks about a man's old crush for a girl called Devu who has now died of cancer. Through letters exchanged he tells a sister — Saraswathy — of his old fondness for the girl with long and thick hair and the later indifference when he meets her years after. The day that Pappan uploaded the story, Saraswathy passed away. It was also at the time of another death anniversary — of his father’s - that he read Padmarajan's story Jeevithacharya. Manoj got in touch with more writers through his friend Ajith Neelanjanam. Thambi Antony called him one night telling he'd like to contribute. K.P. Sudheera mailed that he must go ahead with it. Through her he got in touch with M.T. Vasudevan Nair. Manoj landed at his home in Kozhikode and spent two hours talking. “He told me you are trying something that the white man has failed at. And I told him I would visit him again next year and tell him how many people heard the stories.”

After a time, he began getting more requests than he could manage. They kept uploading a new one every Thursday. “Our team would do the video and the sound and upload the stories.” He showed the same interest in inviting new writers. Amrutha Kelakam, a first year MA Malayalam student of University College was invited after he saw her story published in a weekend magazine. “It is poems I mostly write, stories are rare. I understand the relevance. My friends too read very little. And this initiative is really interesting because you hear the stories in your own voice. Anyone from anywhere in the world could listen to it,” she says.