Storytelling ignites imagination

The article ‘The power of grandma’s stories’ (Young Hans, June 27) makes an interesting read, bringing out the significance of story-telling for children. We grew up in the pleasant company of our grandmothers, relishing the food prepared by them, savouring and cherishing the stories told by them so beautifully and playing varied games along with our siblings and cousins during the holidays at our grandmothers' houses. Not just our grandparents, but also our own parents would tell stories, transporting us to a joyful world as they narrated stories from the ‘Panchatantra’, ‘Ramayana’ and the ‘Mahabharata’ igniting our imagination and bringing out our latent creative faculties.

Later, in our school days, we read the ‘Chandamama’ and ‘Balamitra’ and illustrated storybooks of Tenali Ramakrishna, Akbar and Birbal, etc. Nowadays, we have nuclear families and youngsters rarely get to listen to their grandmothers’ stories. Of course, they do have computers at homes. But computers can never replace the benign presence of grandparents. We need to make storytelling and story reading an integral part of our primary education to mould our children into ‘creative people’.