What better way to celebrate the weekend than to relive those golden days with little ones?
Well, Karadi, the bear who has been telling us stories since 1996, was in the city on January 22 at The Good Shepherd Auditorium.
The Karadi Tales theatrical production by Evam -- ‘Once Upon a Bak-Bak Tree’ is a musical play that unfolds beneath an ancient 450-years-old storytelling tree, called the Bak-Bak Tree. The plays, directed by Amit Singh, started with the Karadi telling us the story of Monkeys on a Fast -- with Chakku as the team leader of the monkey gang. The kids were humming the monkey song along with the monkey gang.
The second story Monkey and the Cap Seller explored the life of ‘Taklu’ (a bald man), whose sufferings in the past made him a cap seller in the present. The monkey gang, with their new leader – Metro (the ‘bro’) lived happily ever after. So did Taklu with his girfriend Usha!
What attracted children most was the ‘Karadi Tales Music Class’ with Usha Uthup -- the Indian pop and jazz singer – as their class teacher. The evening turned into a musical one with the singer singing popular Indian rhymes such as Chai Chai, Red is Amma’s Bindi, Mangoes, Just like you, Puppy’s Tail and The monkey song. The kids sang and danced to the beats of the rhymes.
“From audio books to picture books to video books to e-books, each step of the journey have been really interesting. We have also learned to adapt to newer formats and to see interesting ways to engage children” – said Shobha Vishwanath, the Publishing Director of Karadi Tales.
Karadi Tales started in 1996, when the founders returned from the US, and were searching for audio books for their five-year-old son.
Shobha says, “There were none available in the market. So, we decided to do this on our own. We first started telling stories from the Panchatantra and Jataka . As there were no bears as a part of the folk tales, the Panchatantra or Jataka , we decided Karadi would be the storyteller for all our stories,” she added.
