Celebrating love with stories

It’s the month of love and it’s already in the air. With Valentines Day celebration already gripping the city and hoards of couple activities to choose from, Tall Tales storytelling is dedicating the day to love stories – but the ones with a twist.

“We have always done storytelling based on true stories. Since it is the month of love, we decided to bring to stage love-themed stories not restricted to boy meets girl,” says the 27-year-old curator Akshay Gajria.

Out of the 11 story entries, Akshay short-listed five stories that will be narrated over a period of two hours. “For some reason, all the stories that we received were break-up stories. I don’t know if this is the state of love of this time but we had to filter it out,” he laughs, adding, “So we have a mix-bag now. We have a break-up story, a boy-meets-girl story, first love story, a self-love story and a love story with a dog.”

Each story is about 15 minutes long and goes through a month-long process of refining which also includes Akshay sitting down with the storytellers and help them polish their stories.

“I personally work with new storytellers to extract the complete story because not everyone is comfortable revealing certain parts or aspects of their lives. I coach them on writing the story as not everyone is a born writer,” says Akshay. It is during this process of refining that the curator gauges the honesty in the story.

For the boy-meets-girl love story, the storyteller is a regular and it took the curator only two weeks to polish that story. “This is her fourth story. While all her past stories have been love stories centering around her marriage. The one she has written now is about how they met,” he smiles.

With the oldest narrator in the late 40s and the youngest being a 23-year-old, the stories are celebrating the larger spectrum of love not bound by gender or age. “The oldest narrator is a single woman who is also known as the queen of romance but her love life is bereft of romance. Her story is about her falling in love with herself. It is an interesting twist on her life itself,” shares Akshay and states that each of these stories played an important role in their respective lives and pushed them to become a better person. “The love story with a dog is my story. All my life, I was scared of dogs but suddenly I became a dog lover. It was an entire transformation of life. Each one of these stories has led to the person concerned changing for the better by absorbing the love they felt,” he says.

Talking about the event, Akshay further stresses that it is about celebrating love in all its form. “I was actually hoping to get a same-sex love story but unfortunately that didn’t happen. I want to celebrate love in all its ugliness and beauty and not just the typical Bollywood romance,” concludes Akshay.