Ode to a new breed of story tellers

3 years back I read Sapiens & was stunned. I had never read a nonfiction book like a Murakami book. I just could not put it down. It was like a person with God’s eye who came back to earth and saw everything and then decided to create a movie out of it. Instead, it was a book I could carry around airports, taxi rides, loo and finished it in few days. I was addicted. I read all the remaining books but nothing compared to the first one – well success has it’s effect even on intelligent sentients. Ask Malcolm Gladwell.  

Thanks to my 12^th grader at home due to lockdown, I read Bio Mimicry by Janine Benyus. It was a fantastic look at nature, how the people in the past were much wiser than us in using things from nature. How scientists, designers are learning from nature and creating things which are more adaptable to nature. The language used and the visual description of professors, researchers and their love and passion for their subject was explained so beautifully – that you could visualize the author standing on front of a grass land or listening to a professor who has been studying about a certain variety of seed, nurturing it almost like his own baby & trying to explain all that in 30 mnts. Imagine the prof from Back to the Future.

Now, I am half-way through Origin Story, By David Christian which tackles the story of our origin, solar system, big bang theory, atom and so on so forth. Again you will read about science – where he talks about love, jealously, trench coated villain – and yes he is talking about science.

There are many people I know (and we all know) who have some knowledge about so many things. But Are you a good story teller, you may not write a book but how do you make a cab ride on the middle of night into a great story (this was a topic of a stand up comedy which I saw), or how do you explain the Arab conundrum to a 12^th grade (askmom.com – the wife) this was the conversation I enjoyed during my night walk yesterday?

Giving your story a shape take time & effort, tons of dedication and a sense of purpose, a belief that nobody have heard this before – or this can change the perspective.

Good writing & story tellers (I include movies in this) inspire wannabe story tellers like me. It re-kindles the emotion which goes dormant or gets covered under the carpet of living life for 5 days and tries to sneak out over the weekend 😊