Storytelling that goes beyond the hashtag
by Radhika Viswanathan
Do you know that I once…You’ll never guess what happened to me last Sunday…Can I tell you about the time I met this person…
We all love a good story. A story that captures the attention of everyone around us. We use stories to convey information. We marvel when stories create an empathetic connection between the storyteller and the audience, a bridge between what we know and what we don’t; and a space for commonality, revelation, of shared whispers and universal truths.
Storytelling has been used since well before our collective memory, but it has received a lot of attention in recent years. It’s a buzzword of sorts — ‘storytelling’, under which hides our need for continuous content, because we all want to find our voice amidst the cacophony on social media. The personal story emerges as a powerful stance against the polarisation of opinion on a subject because when told truthfully, it becomes a story about everything.
At Vaaka when we work on stories, we often ask ourselves: what should we be thinking about? How do we make the listener — you — care? How do we make you feel an unfamiliar experience, how do we make you see the whole world through a different set of eyes, even for a few fleeting moments?
To lose ourselves in the story would be telescopic. Our aim is to use it to open up a world of questions, a world in which we can all engage, where we constantly ask ourselves, what does this mean? Why is this happening? What can I do about it? We spend a lot of time thinking about who our listener is and what they would want to listen to. With the topics we like to talk about, formulaic narratives often don’t work.
At Vaaka, we like to work on complex narratives, the ones that highlight our personal journeys and embed them within our interconnected lives. Messy stories, complex stories, are compelling. And they are true to life. In our minds, good storytelling does not give the receiver everything. It should create a mood, an experience immersive enough that they feel comfortable within it, because a good story lets the listener navigate their own way through it.
We want the raw stories, that may not have clear beginnings or end, that meander and drop listeners off part of the way so that they can go off and explore by themselves. We want stories with messy endings, or where there are no endings, because they are yet to be written. We want stories that inspire our community to engage more. To ask us ‘what happens next’?
Yet, a story can be great but it’s retelling can be a disappointment. And there is a real craft to telling a powerful story (and we’ll write more about that in future articles). Many of these challenges were presented to us when we started working on Kaalavastha.
We started working on Kaalavastha in August last year. Kaalavastha means climate or the weather in Malayalam, the language of the coastal state of Kerala, in South India. The show is meant to chronicle the aftermath of Kerala’s big flood in 2018, the first it had experienced in close to 100 years, and how it was turning into a moment of reckoning for the people of the state who were realising their vulnerability to climate change. Shortly after we began working on the show, in mid-2019, the second big rain struck. It was now accepted that the monsoons had altered. The rains would not be as predictable, they sometimes occured in shorter, more devastating bursts, leaving huge numbers of people homeless from floods and landslides.
How do you tell a story that is unfolding? Do stories like this ever have an ending?
When we started our research, the story we thought we were telling was about Kerala’s resilience in the face of climate change, the impact of a single flood. But soon after we began new disasters hit the state like COVID-19. We realised that resilience is about how small decisions are made over time in the face of continuous damage. It’s not about finding a story with an ending, it’s about the stories of these decisions.
We realised we needed to talk to people from across the state. To see how their own lives were being changed by these events. How did they see it? And how were they re-imagining their futures?
Kaalavastha is a six part series. You can listen to it now wherever you get your podcasts or at the link above.
