Crafting fantasies and bewitching the minds of his listeners with inspiring stories is not what Bangalore-based storyteller, Ameen Haque, did for a living a year ago.
Originally an advertising professional, Ameen founded a group of professional storytellers called "The Storywallahs". Since then he has told stories to corporate houses, school and college students and even children with disabilities all across Bangalore. He is currently preparing for a storytelling session for young adults at Atta Galatta on December 28.
“I had witnessed an enchanting session by Geeta Ramanujan and that inspired me to leave my well-paying job at and take up storytelling professionally,” says Ameen. He has told inspiring tales about leadership, romance, college life and has also conducted workshops for school teachers, disabled children and orphans.
“If I ask someone the Pythagoras Theorem or the Archimedes Principal, it would them a while before they can recollect it. However if the same person is asked to recall the hare and the tortoise story they would do it immediately. Lessons learnt via the conventional teaching methods can be retained only on a short-term basis. However, if the same is told in a story format, then it remains in the long-term memory. So, I devised this strategy to help teach through stories. The same strategy applies to the corporates as well,” says Ameen.
He is greatly inspired by his surroundings. “I would like to highlight two incidents from my second career that have inspired me. In a session, I was repeating a story that I had told four months back to the same children at the Spastic Society. As I began, a child came up to me and reminded me of my previous session. Considering the fact that a disabled child has an average attention span of two minutes, I was really taken aback by his recollection. Then there was a wedding where I was invited for a session. Although I couldn’t go there because of the Bangalore Literature Festival, I felt weird and happy at the same time. Weird because, in a wedding where people generally call upon DJs, they invited me and happy because I realised that the power of storytelling was spreading rapidly,” says Ameen.
