An Evening with the Storywallah!

 Bangalore has a lot to offer when it comes to activities for kids so much so that I am always faced with an overload of options as the weekend approaches! Once you have kids, they  take the priority in everything including your weekends and your weekends are no longer exclusively yours to go clubbing/partying or just laze around doing nothing!  While the end of week holiday is the only time to unwind after a hectic week at work, weekend is also the only day-out-with-parents for the kids! So as far as possible, on most weekends, we’ve tried to set aside some time to take Abhay for some activity or event in the city. But with the city spread out like never before, many of the activities/events often entail long traffic-ridden commute in as much as the weekend is gone before you know it!

Over the last weekend however, we took Abhay to an event closer home which proved to be just as entertaining for us adults as it was for kids! “An evening with storywallahs” at “Atta Galatta” located in Koramangala. It was an evening where an enchanting storyteller, Ameen Haque transported the kids into a world far different from their own, a world before the man walked on it, the story of how the crow earned its name or how the rooster forgot to cry "cocka-doodle-doo"! Abhay liked both the stories that were performed and enjoyed interacting with the storywallah while repeating the one liners after him as he beautifully dramatized the story without any props or puppets. Courtesy the Storywallah, “The Story of the most beautiful bird” is a story of the sun who refused to come out as it was bored with its daily humdrum causing many plants and animals to suffer. So a meeting was called out by all the animals and birds wherein it was decided to send a bird out to the sun to convince to do his daily job. But the question was, who should be sent? Should it be the nightingale, the kingfisher or the peacock? All of them refuse for the fear of getting burnt while nearing the sun, saying “Na baba na …” (which all the kids repeated!). Finally, a bird with rainbow coloured feathers takes up the mammoth responsibility of conferring with the sun for the sake of all living beings. Does the rainbow bird succeed? What becomes of it? How do we know  this bird now? Listen on as the storywallah will enthrall you every second Saturday at Atta Galatta!