The Importance of Being a Story Teller in Today's World

Sreekumar K

We always lived in groups. That is our anthropological story. In nature, everything follows a distribution pattern which is technically called the normal distribution and is represented on graphs as a bell curve. That is nature where, to use Portia's words, "it is no mean thing to be seated in the mean' mostly because the mean or average is more common that the extremes.  Mathematically, the mean is more often than not, the mode and median too.

But when nurture interferes, this story has a different plot, an inclined one, so to speak. For example with regard to education, in good schools with remedial facilities, this bell curve goes under a hammer, and is skewed to the right. In badly run societies, the economic bell curve goes under the unfair mallet and skews to the left. Mostly, this is accentuated because of newly lengthened 'x' axis. The 'x' axis shows the extent of wealth.

We have unnatural societies today. When we had naturally built societies, they spread on land. Even in  city, you still see a bell curve within its limits. When we went to cyber space, we went more unnatural and now we have groups which are ironically called the social media. There is no society there.  They are just groups built across space to connect economically similar people or peoples. These groups are homogeneous groups. There was a time when one half of the world didn't know how the other half lived. Today, this could be said about groups in societies. Even with so much of information deluge, and binding communication facilities, one is surprised at one group's ignorance of the other group's life, dynamics, relationships, life style and even wealth. 

In WhatsApp, people go on making personal groups which are mostly for a certain purpose. Information is passed only among the few. In Facebook, there is an option to be in exclusive groups. And the socializing  within the groups take so much time that there is no time left to get a sneak peek at another group. With the advent of the Real Estate Revolution, the residential association too is a homogeneous group. The natural geographically marked group has gone dysfunctional. This has desensitized us to such an extent that we are not much bothered about casteism coming back for a rerun.

When things were different, we could tell stories, entertain and enrich one another. But it is a different world today, a world, as Mathew Arnold lamented, where "ignorant armies clash by night'. 

So, this is the time for us to quit our old style of story telling and become group hopping journalists.  We can still tell stories but let it be in such a way that we demolish "the narrow domestic walls'. Let the nuggets of life that we see around us be celebrated and the souvenirs from them mounted on our pages. The dew drop hanging at the tip of a grass, reflects the world 360 degree. By reflecting what is all around, it creates a tiny world in itself. Go for them, friends!