“The little fish lived in the ocean from the beginning of time. It loved swimming in circles and did so happily every day. Years went by and it remained the same; it never grew old. One day, I released a fish that I grew in a bowl at home into the sea. But as soon as it touched water, its scales got scraped because of all the garbage in the sea. The two fish became friends. My fish couldn’t take the pain any longer and told his friend about it. The friend listened patiently and asked it to come closer. It wrapped the hurt fish with its fins and held it close. In that moment, a wave of butterflies tore through the air from the middle of the ocean. The fish’s pain was all gone, and he was good as new.”
This is a story narrated by a little boy at Urur Olcott Kuppam. “It’s on par with our classics, isn’t it?” asks K Sivaraj of Cuckoo Movement for Children, who runs Thumbi, a bilingual children’s magazine. The story is part of a chain — it will travel to Coimbatore and then to Madurai; children from the two cities will add their own stories to complete the chain. “Our September edition will publish these,” explains Sivaraj.
Thumbi organised a story-telling and play-acting event for children from Urur Olcott last week. Held over two days, the programme was conducted by theatre artiste S Meenakshi and team, and R Karpagam, a story-teller from the city. The children sat in a circle on the beach as Karpagam told them the story of Raakaye and Rakayya. They laughed and squealed; jumped and hop-skipped. But the purpose of the event was to get the children to tell their stories which was achieved on the third day.
With the help of Kaushik Kumar of Akarmaa Foundation who has been working with children from the area — by constructing a play centre by the beach for the kids — Sivaraj got the children to open up to them. “We heard a lot of stories. Many of them spoke of a certain insecurity or the other,” he says. The little girl with body issues, the little boy dealing with skin colour prejudice…Sivaraj says that many of them do not have an atmosphere of trust at home. “They cannot speak with their parents like they do with a friend,” he says.
Stories, he feels, can help ease things. “These days, children are being subject to a lot of violence at a tender age. We read of sexual assaults more often than we do a happy story of an old man planting trees,” he says. As someone who’s worked with children from all strata for over a decade, Sivaraj says that stories can help deal with this negativity. “A child might listen to one and equate it with a situation in her life. This might give her more confidence; a reason to cheer up and declutter her mind,” he adds.
Stories form the core of Thumbi that is run by a team that includes R Nesan, G Suyambu Selvi, R Thiagarajan, P Muthukrishnan, D Sankar, and Palaniappan Ramanthan. “Following Coimbatore, where we held a similar programme on July 26 and 27, we plan to hold one for children from disadvantaged backgrounds in Madurai on July 30 and 31,” explains Sivaraj.
