The excitement on the day of any StoryWeaver workshop is often mixed with some nervousness. We meet so many new people from different organisations and always want them to share the excitement we feel about books in classrooms! We wonder if the participants would connect with what we have to say and how they will react. This nervousness gets  magnified when the workshop is in an all new city.

Thankfully, our wonderful community never disappoints :) Here’s an account of our last two workshops in the beautiful cities of Jaipur and Hyderabad.

We were in Jaipur during the first week of October to host a StoryWeaver workshop with educators and resource leads of various education organisations. The workshop was our first in the city and was organised with the support of Jawahar Kala Kendra (JKK). They gave us access to their stunning centre and their library -- forming the perfect venue for a workshop on the importance of reading.

We had representatives from 18 organisations across Rajasthan attending the workshop, including UNICEF,  Educate Girls, OELP, Doosa Dashak and GoodWeave India. It was wonderful to host participants who had travelled from as far as Jodhpur and Bikaner. As the session progressed, we deep dived into the intriguing world of stories and explored how stories open a child’s eyes to a world filled with joy and learning.

The participants tried their hand at StoryWeaver and chose themes that they found most interesting and explored the platform for stories around them.

One of the most lively discussions was around how different kinds of books can be used with children across various age groups. One participant raised a pertinent point about the need for books in tough subjects like bullying, migration, and hunger. They also enjoyed putting on their writer’s hats and created some lovely stories on the platform.

At the end of the workshop, one of the teachers, who had come from faraway Jodhpur, told us that this was the first workshop she and her colleagues had ever attended outside their centres. This statement demonstrated the enormous responsibility that rests on us - to ensure our workshops stay relevant and productive for our teachers and educators who travel great distances putting their work and home on hold to attend our workshops. 

After our first StoryWeaver workshop in Jaipur, we organised our next in the familiar city of Hyderabad. With the support of Dr. Reddy’s Foundation, the workshop saw participants from various organisations like AIF, Youth4Jobs and Youngistaan Foundation.

 

To celebrate the diversity of languages we have, we had a resource person, Haripriya, help us conduct some parts of the workshop in Telugu. Haripriya runs a gorgeous children’s library in Hyderabad and was a  participant in our last Hyderabad workshop. Her presence not only encouraged participants to share their thoughts in Telugu, she also helped us showcase our best Telugu books.

“I thoroughly enjoyed facilitating the workshop in my mother tongue, Telugu. I had a memorable time sharing and learning from educators from different organisations who came together to understand how best they can make use of the platform in their classrooms. Together we read, created, translated books in English, Hindi and Telugu,” she remarked after the workshop.

 

Our team and the participants agreed that the lunch organised by Dr. Reddy’s Foundation was one of the most delicious meals we had had in a long time. Maddirala Sai Praveen from Azim Premji Foundation, a participant who has experience working with young children in anganwadi centres, volunteered to conduct an energiser post the hearty meal. That got all of us all laughing! The youngest participant of the workshop was the eight year-old daughter of a teacher in attendance and we have to say she was the most energetic of the lot!

As the year comes to a close, we would like to thank all our wonderful participants who make these workshops an amazing learning experience for us. We are also grateful to our new and potential partners, and friends of Pratham Books like Jawahar Kala Kendra and Dr. Reddy’s Foundation for their constant  support.

Here is wishing our readers a Happy New ‘Reading’ Year for 2019.

If you are interested in hosting a similar workshop for your organisation, drop us an email on [email protected]

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If you grew up during the 80s and the 90s, you could not not have pored over copies of popular children’s (in today’s time it would have targeted the Young Adult category) magazine Target, published by the India Today group. A constant companion during long train journeys, sultry afternoons during summer vacations, copies of Target magazine were zealously guarded from annoying friends with borrowing-but-not-returning habits. Along with a slew of reader contributions, in-house features (anybody remembers that fantastic page dedicated to pen friends?) Target ran a bunch of popular comic strips including Detective Moochhwala by Ajit Ninan, Granny’s Gupshup by Praloy Chakravorty, It Happened in History by Renuka Narayanan. But perhaps the most memorable character remains Gardhab Das, a kurta-pajama wearing, harmonium wielding donkey, who was also an unemployed music teacher.

Co-created by cartoonist brothers Neelab and Jayanto Banerjee, Gardhab's favourite weapon for “mass destruction" was his singing talent or the lack of it. His singing mostly landed him in trouble, but sometimes it also got him out of sticky situations.

And bringing back the charm of Gardhab Das and the nostalgia associated with him is Jayanto with his newest creation for Pratham Books: Gadbad Das, son of Gardhabh, a millennial of sorts, but unfortunately for him, musical talent is still not in his genes. Gadbad lives in small town India. Like his pa, Gadbad is a terrible singer too. Everybody knows this, except him! Gadbad does various odd jobs to survive and solves his problems musically mostly. Like in his debut book — No Water for you, where Gadbad has to fix a puncture in his cycle shop, but he has run out of water. Off goes Gadbad to find some water, but it’s not as easy as you’d think.

Gadbad’s creator Jayanto, who has, post Target, done stints at India Today, Times of India, and Hindustan Times as a cartoonist, tells us why he decided to resurrect Gardhab Das into our lives again with his mini-me: Gadbad, reminisces about Target days and creating an iconic cartoon character.

What was the original inspiration for the Gardabh Das comic strip that ran in Target from 1980s to early 90s?

To do that I will have to go back to that era. This was the late 1980s and the editor of Target was Rosalind Wilson, a British lady. She wanted an Indian cartoon strip to be created as a double spread in the magazine and Neelabh and I met with her to discuss the possibility of creating a comic strip once in three months. Her brief to us was very clear, “It should be about your life [ we were from Lucknow], the comic strip needs to have a small town feel to it. We thought about it and decided that unlike every other comic strip that had superheroes, our hero basically would be a loser. He would be terrible at singing and unemployed and that kind of gave us that a fertile space to create really funny situations that protagonist Gardhab Das keeps getting into.

What was the appeal of Gardhab Das during his time?

Gardhab had to be an everyday character, and relatable to kids, their parents and grown ups as well. What was to be a three-monthly comic strip (featured as a double spread) soon became a monthly affair thanks to its immense popularity. In fact Gardhab became so popular that the comic strip became part of Target’s popular yearly diary, made it to annual issues and even got its own digest. There was a point in time when Gardhab was going to be killed off because its illustrator Neelab (Jayanto claims his brother was much better at creating Gardhab than him) had decided to move on, but the then editor Vijaya Ghosh insisted that Jayanto continue with the comic strip and it had another successful run for the next few years until the magazine shuttered.

What inspired you to create Garbad Das for Pratham Books? How is Gadbad similar or different from the legendary Gardabh Das?

Initially while discussing with the Pratham Books editorial team we wondered whether we should bring back the original Gardabh Das for the book. But we realised that Gardabh belonged to another era and we wanted to contemporise the character even though father and son have the same talents. Hence we decided to introduce Gadbad Das, son of Gardabh Das, a character who was born after the year 2000. Even though Gadbad might be contemporary, the look and feel of the character and the setting are more small town than metros. A hand pump, a very rare site in big cities is still prevalent in small town India. But water and water shortage is a common problem that plagues the entire country.

Jayanto hopes that Gadbad Das can become a series and become as popular as his illustrious father. Characters such as RK Laxman’s Common Man and the Amul Girl have grown on us, and are still going strong, so why not Gadbad Das, says Jayanto.

 

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“Open source is a philosophy and a movement, and what makes open source thrive is the community that grows up around it.” says Abby Kerns in The Newstack. Community has no physical or geographical definition but rather is defined by a shared attitude, interest and goal and spans  geography, religion and political affiliations. Stories are the soul of open-source platforms, which prompt children to rapid fluency in their mother tongue, before they can read simple sentences in English. 

Illustration by Huynh Thi Kim Lien for 'Don't Wake the Baby!' 

Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver and Room to Read are partnering to combine the power of open, community and stories so that children can read over 400 storybooks in English, Bengali, Chinyanja, Chitonga, Hindi, Khmer, Lao, Marathi, Nepali, Sepedi, Sinhala, SiSwati, Kiswahili, Tamil, and Vietnamese. “Room to Read and Pratham Books share a common commitment to providing underserved children with high quality storybooks. We are delighted to have Room to Read’s books on our digital platform, StoryWeaver,  which are now available under open licences, so that children everywhere can discover the joy of reading”, says Suzanne Singh, Chairperson Pratham Books.

Room to Read is a non-profit organization that seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in low-income countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Founded on the belief that “world change starts with educated children," the organization focuses on working in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations and governments to develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children. 

They have partnered with StoryWeaver to publish 200 of their original language titles and their English versions on the StoryWeaver platform under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. The StoryWeaver team has worked closely with Room to Read on editing these titles for publishing in Engalish, doing image enhancements and migrating the books to the platform. Alisha Berger, Global Publisher at Room to Read says “We are thrilled to partner with Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver to bring our books into the digital space for the first time. We hope these 400 openly-licensed books will inspire, motivate, and share the joy of reading with the wide and engaged audience on Storyweaver, as well as showcase Room to Read’s 20-year commitment to making exciting and fun books for children in their local languages.” 

Having these storybooks under the CC BY license on StoryWeaver takes these Room to Read stories to a larger audience, worldwide. At the same time, it gives the StoryWeaver community new stories to read and translate, thereby giving children around the world access to more stories in their mother tongue. Many of these stories have already been versioned into other languages like Punjabi, Filipino, Malayalam, French, Italian and others. Here’s hoping the stories continue to grow so as to put a book in every child’s hand. 

If you would like to partner with us please write to [email protected] 

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