Actor and director Vinay Varma’s organisation Sutradhar, in association with G P Birla Centre, has launched an initiative called Abhivyakti (Expression), to promote and popularise Hindustani literature enthusiasts. “Stories widen the horizon of a child, it helps him/her to imagine what follows next. A story does not end, it is only a plot that ends. Stories continue,” says Vinay Varma, director of Sutradhar.
Abhivyakti, which is into its ninth edition, will celebrate the World Reading Day with Vinay Varma bringing alive Himanshu Joshi’s Saaye (Shadow) at the G P Birla Centre last Sunday.
Being an actor helps Vinay as he can dramatise the story with voice modulations. “The story reading session is like a cross between a radio play and reading, leading to creating visuals,” he says. The story-teller shares that he picks up stories from school text books — be it Munshi Premchand or Ismat Chugtai. “In school, it is not a story, it is a lesson and the children go through it as academics with the intention to get marks. I am not sure in how many schools, the lesson (story) is made interesting,” says Vinay.
He challenges that not many would know the Varnamala correctly. “This is an important part of the workshop. This helps in pronunciation and diction. Some of the stories I choose were originally written in Urdu, not in Devanagari,” Vinay says. He adds that Premchand’s stories were popular even in those days, when there was no internet because they connected with the people.
In one of the sessions, the actor read Jainendra Kumar’s Pazeb , had an instant connect with the children and their parents. “The story talked about how parents with pre-conceived notions question their child,” says the actor. Vinay adds that the age group at the session ranges from 10 to 80 years.
In the context of letter writing, Vinay says: “Earlier, people would write letters, but today with modern communication, the art of letter writing is dead. It is just confined to schools, where one is taught academic letter writing. Today’s generation doesn’t know what is ‘Taar’ (Telegram)? They will say it is ‘wire’. But in the olden days, there was telegram and it was a challenge to use words aptly and precisely.”
Sharing a humorous anecdote, Vinay says, “A truck driver sent a telegram to his in-laws stating ‘Wife loaded, take delivery’. His wife was pregnant and he could not drop her at her parents place and wanted them to receive her at the station. What a comedy it was?”
In the two-hour story reading session that is held on the last Sunday of every month, Vinay Varma regales his audiences with words, phrases and proverbs. “I trigger the thought process of my audiences and sometimes about the forgotten indoor and outdoor games after the mobiles made an entry into our lives,” he says.
