Mira and Daleep Kakkar at a story-telling session in a city bookstore

Story-telling is a new-age profession. Age-old tales are being packaged and presented by “pros”, and no one is complaining. While it offers a good source of entertainment to the kids, it keeps a steady stream of customers coming to the bookstores with their little ones.

Story sessions are a regular affair organised by bigger bookstores in the city in their children’s sections. Unlike at book-reading sessions for adults where authors or famous personalities hold court, here the professional story-tellers do the job. Mira and Daleep Kakkar, a story-telling couple, have been conducting such sessions in the city, including at Starmark and British Council Library.

“In this age where most kids have working parents and their grandparents don’t live with them, they often lose out on the joy of listening to stories. Our rich Indian folk tales go unheard, and, with the intrusion of computer games, most valuable books go unread. We decided to capitalise on this and turn storytelling into an art,” says Mira.

And how different is her storytelling from the good old days of listening to tales while lying beside your grandma on a huge wooden bed?

“We try to involve the children too. We turn a story, mainly Indian folk tales, into a script and sometimes change the ending or rather enrich it. In a story about the emperor Akbar, where he was about to throw three thieves into the river, fish object to the throwing of the bodies. We have music, dance and lots of fun to capture a child’s attention,” adds Mira. The response has been so overwhelming that she is planning a story-telling festival in future.

But such fun does not come free. One has to dish out Rs 150 per year to be a member of the story-telling club at Starmark. A member is given a card and there are gifts when he makes a purchase from the shop. Thus, the story is a smooth way of hooking a customer.

Surbhi Chhajer, who conducts such sessions at Crossword, says she uses a lot of props to make her story-telling lively. So when the story is of Hansel and Gretel, out comes a mask of a witch to “scare” a gathering of around 25 children.

No wonder her clientele, mostly from extremely well-to-do families and students of upmarket schools in the city, love to gather on the second floor of the bookshop every Sunday for a bit of fun. And since most of them are members (the fees are the same as Starmark’s), they form a community.

It helps parents too. “I love to bring my kid here. He has his own share of fun and I too can spend some time on my own,” says Menka Mishra, a parent. “It allows me to spend some quality time with my husband which is not possible otherwise with our busy schedule,” says another parent.

Shiv Ram Bala of Crossword, Mumbai, claims that the parents are their ultimate target. “Most kids are accompanied by their parents. So while the child listens to stories, the parent can spend some time browsing through and buying books from our stores. Storytelling sessions also come in handy to popularise new books among the children,” he said.

Besides storytelling, Oxford Bookstore organises different kinds of workshops for kids (mostly members and frequent buyers) every Sunday. “We have to hold on to their attention,” says a bookstore spokesman.