Dear Companions-in-Katha:
great story must ultimately make one feel that life is beautiful, despite all odds, and so let me begin by drawing a parallel between ‘Life is Beautiful’ (La Vita è Bella), the 1997 Italian film which tells the story of a Jewish Italian, Guido Orefice who employs his astoundingly lush imagination to enliven his family during their captivity in a Nazi concentration camp, and the Katha series of Public Interface Programmes at the CUK that celebrates the vital role of ‘story’ in moulding, individuals, cultures and societies.
You know the story, I know, but great stories are meant to be retold, and so let us go with Guido to Arezzo in the years before World War II. As you know, he takes up a waiter’s job at his uncle's hotel, but aspires to set up a bookstore. What is life, without dreams?
Our man is whimsical to the point of being utterly charismatic, romantic to the point of being absolutely funny. He woos Dora, who according to him is a true princess, not because she hails from a wealthy, aristocratic, non-Jewish Italian family, but because she is like the morning sunrise showering its graces over all things on earth and beyond. And, as all fairy tales must go, our quixotic hero steals his love away from her engagement party, leaving her mother aghast, and her aristocratic and arrogant fiancé distraught.
We see the couple a few years later when the fairy tale has rambled into the thick of mid-20th century hostilities. Guido and Dora now have a son, Giosuè, and, in an ironic counter-act to the political backdrop, we see a reconciliation happening in the personal sphere—between Dora and her estranged mother, just prior to Giosuè's fourth birthday. But, all is not yet well; the War has begun.
On Giosuè's birthday, Guido, Uncle Eliseo and Giosuè are forced onto a train and taken to a concentration camp. In the camp, Guido hides his son from the Nazi guards, and in a spectacular attempt to keep up his spirits, makes up an irresistible tale: He tells his son that the camp is just a game, in which the first person to get 1,000 points wins a military tank. He convinces his son that the camp guards want the tank for themselves and that all the other children are hiding in order to win the game. If Giosuè cries, complains or says that he is hungry, he will lose points to the quiet boys who hide from the guards. To Giosuè's requests to end the game, he tells him that they are in the lead for the tank. Despite being surrounded by rampant misery, sickness and death, Giosuè does not question this fiction because of his father's supreme performance, which is his supreme sacrifice, too, and his own innocence. Ha, this little man’s astounding imagination; the magical powers of his story!
Guido maintains this yarn right until the end when, in the wake of the American advance, he tells his son to stay in a sweatbox until everybody has left, this being the final test before the tank is his. Giosuè manages to survive and thinks he has won the game when an American tank arrives to liberate the camp. The story merges with life. Fiction blends with fact. Dream comes true.
In the New Year week of 2010, when the Katha series of Public Interface Programmes occurred to me as an idea, its inspiration was clearly a vision of the transformational genius of storytelling as reflected in Roberto Benigni’s Guido and many others like him from far and wide in time and space – the Greek Oracle, the Rishi of ancient Bharata, the Buddhist monk, the Wandering Jew, the totemic cultures of Africa, Americas and the East, the crusaders, the medieval Bhakti poets, Shakespeare, the red armies, Dostoevsky, Einstein, Isadora Duncan, Picasso, Gandhi, my mother. All of them manifest the gunas that Guido’s story represents.
And, indeed, the oncoming tides of Katha participants at CUK, since the beginning of this story, have discovered over and over, the pleasure of indulging in these: the quest of one’s vital spirit for an alternative truth that defies the factual, logical world of inequalities, injustice, extremism and cruelty; the recognition of the immensity of beauty and joy accessible to us despite our limitations; the promise and hope offered by human imagination; the story’s appeal to humanity at large; the subtlety of fictional expression; the speed of figurative delivery; and most importantly, trust, the sole anchor that must support our race in these turbulent times.
Before we go into the episodes of this story, I must mention a few important names, for every story indeed is given its direction and colour by many a luminous individual presence.
The Vice Chancellor of CUK, Prof. Jancy James, herself a comparatist and story enthusiast, responded to the idea with great fervour and took no time in giving approval to the proposal, and there we were, on our feet in a day of Katha’s conceptual birth.
The effect of the earnest engagement of the faculty members on the students was instantaneous. The first batch of CUK’s postgraduate students – all twelve of them to-be-apostles—came forth and got baptised into ‘Katha’ , accepted it as their own story, a tradition which has been religiously followed by the later batches. But for the eagerness of these young people, ‘Katha’ would not have written its story this far.
The name ‘Katha’ was inspired by my friend Geeta Dharmarajan’s visionary enterprise in New Delhi that endeavours to link languages and cultures in India through translation, with which I had the pleasure to associate. But the logo came from a Southerner who had turned a Kasargodan by choice – GB Valsan. Kasaragod was a backward district for us who had only followed statistical reports till we met Valsan Mash, our one-stop-shop till today for Kasargodan gen
Valsan Mash’s amazing social skills and cultural know-how were willingly shared with the CUK, and we rediscovered Kasaragod as a land of many languages, cultures, and amazing mindscapes. Through him, we met people.
This meaning-laden Katha logo is G B Valsan’s making.
We met people who taught us the art of sharing unconditionally: Abbas, Ajayan and Kala, who designed our invites, posters, banners etc and got them printed impressively, and have since stayed with us, eliciting exclamations -- wow, is this quality possible in Kasaragod????--- from delegates at our events. And many others, who contributed in some way or the other, putting up with such demands that they never before encountered. The Story-teller motif below that we used on our first brochure and
banner comes from his friend, and now our friend, sculptor Vasavan
Satheesan.
We have all been transformed through our engagement in Katha. We have bridged gaps, we have shed our baggage, we have reached out. We have met local artists, photographers, videographers, performance artists, cultural ambassadors, media people. And, we believe, we have transformed Kasaragod, too. We are happy that we have been able to incorporate local talent into this story, hence making it a true public interface programme, and a site of transformation.
Katha I: Ramayana and Other Stories, the first in the Katha series of Public Interface Programmes, was triggered by renowned Ramayana Scholar, Prof. Paula Richman’s visit to India. Paula and I had worked together earlier, and I am yet to find an academician who impossibly mixes a deep sensitivity and unshakeable rigour as she does. She agreed to come to Kasaragod, thus making it a truly glocal space, and ‘Katha’, the CUK’s first Public Interface Programme, was born, just three months after the Department of Comparative Literature was inaugurated.
Today, Katha has crossed many milestones. It has taken into its fold many narratives – visual culture, performance traditions, orality, marginalised narratives, various forms of cultural expression and self realisation. As it is a continuum that allows free play of elements, random mixes, carnivalesque sites, subversive chronotopes etc., instead of concluding I wish to propose an invocation here. A twin-faced prayer, that looks at once to the intertwined narrative of the arts in India and to the myriad possibilities of assimilation, accretion and continuance that the stories around the world offer us.
And, in the same instant, and I would conjure up the inimitable John Lennon and ask him to sing to us again in his magical voice that must connect ages, places, traditions, histories, cults, ideologies and what not in the thread of a song that inspires us to IMAGINE :
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
Come, all ye faithful. Come, one and all. Imagine, Create, Share, Celebrate. There are no questions asked, for, it is the times of the Story. Hail KATHA!
Rizio Yohannan Raj
Your Companion-in-Katha
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