I am fond of stories. In my life, I’ve read and heard a lot of stories and I’ve told many stories to people around me. I’ve told stories to individuals, to groups, even to myself when needed. But I’ve never channelized it. Never promoted or even considered myself as a storyteller. But there are stories inside me. Stories that I want to channelise. So I decided to pen those stories down and see how it goes.
I think a story is all about moving the listener. In an interview, Kobe Bryant said that “stories move the world” and I also believe in this notion. Just listening to a story about somebody can create a very strong perception in your mind about them and their lives.
Similarly, I heard stories about Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. And I became a fan of them. And let me tell you that I am not at all a fan of basketball. I have never watched a single complete game of basketball ever in my life by the time of writing this story. Who can tell about the future?. I do not know any damn rules about basketball. I cannot even name 10 players of that sport. Maybe I am not a fan of the game but I am a fan of how they played that game. I am a fan of all the hard work that they’ve put into the sport, of all the skill sets that they developed, of all the learnings that they did to become what they became.
And I remember growing particularly fond of Kobe Bryant. The first time I heard about him was in 2020. And in January of 2021, he died in a helicopter crash. I was in Bhopal at that time preparing for my entrance exam and when I heard the news, it took me all day to even accept it. It shook me so much that I spoke to no one that day. I just couldn’t, not when I lost someone so close to my heart. I could not explain to others the reason for my immense sadness. When someone asked me, I told them that someone close to me passed away.
Yet I have faced an unfortunately similar incident. I loved Sidhu Moose Wala. If you don’t know him, he was one of the best Punjabi singers of all time. He was murdered with gunshots like Tupac. I loved all the stories that I heard about him. Stories that he told through his interviews and songs, as well as from other people who have met him in his life. When I came to know about his death, I was upset as hell. I was heartbroken, but, this time I grieved differently- I paid my respect by celebrating the way he lived his life. This time around I was in Kerala, and we bought a cake and we wrote on it, “Thank you legend”. It was a very crucial time in college, semester exams were just a week away and I flew back home for a week just because I was not able to process that pain there in college. I wanted to spend time around my loved ones. So I came back home for a few days.
I’ve heard stories about Ratan Tata. I have never met this great persona of a human, never even truly researched about his impactful work and yet, his story moves me. His story motivates me to do good work.
This is the case with stories of Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, MS Dhoni, Nelson Mandela, Booker T. Washington, Sylvester Stallone, etc. Just a glimpse of their life, a social media post, a book, an article, a documentary, really a quick glance into their lives, and we are moved. An impact like I’ve been hit by a rock thrown into my stomach. That is the power of stories.
To me, stories have no pattern or format. There is nothing like it needs to be some fixed number of words. It can be a 500 pages book or it can be an incident described in 2 pages, it can be a quote on social media, podcast, blog, song, documentary, movie, literally anything. It can be anything that can move people from inside. It can be anything that just makes home in people’s heart.
A good story stays with the listener for almost forever. Names, dates, timelines might be forgotten but the story remains. Forever etched in the memory of the listener. Forever etched in their hearts. Just like we have been listening to the same mythological stories for centuries in every religion.
To move the hearts of people, you don’t always need an autobiography of some accomplished businessman, philanthropist etc. It can be fictional too, like the one in The Alchemist. Or a simple incident in the ordinary life of a normal person.
But not every story carries a moral value with it. In childhood, we used to read stories in our textbooks and at the end of those stories, there was always a “Moral of the story”. In my opinion, some stories are just stories. Those stories are let loose in the vast universe and they stick to the people who are meant to receive those stories. Same story may speak differently to different people. People may read the same book, but they will feel connected to the different incidents. And they will deduce different moral values from the same story.
Energy takes the form of stories. And it reminds me of the law of conservation of energy which states that Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed. It can only be transferred from one form to another. So stories are also the form that this energy takes. If you imagine a story as some flowing energy, you can see it like, when a person listens to a nice story, that energy flows into the body and mind of the listener, and then the listener’s body and mind reacts accordingly. If it is a good story, then that human being is motivated to do something good. Story’s energy makes a positive shift in that human being. Similarly, you have seen people listening to news, of all the evil things happening in the world, and then their body mind reacts in a negative way. They feel bad, stressed, anxious, etc. So I feel like those stories also contain some energy in them.
Stories carry energy. Energy of the event, of the person they belonged to, of the storyteller, of the plot it is associated with, etc. Each story has its own energy. There can be a way to tell a story to influence the person in many different ways. And sometimes, you’d like to listen to a story from a particular person only. You’d not like to listen if some other person would be telling the same story.
These were some things about stories that I could comprehend so far and I believe that there is way more to it, that even I’ve not grasped until now. That is yet to be unveiled to me. But I am a thousand percent sure that stories will last until the last human being on this planet, or even beyond.
Writing here are those that have impacted me personally and those that I have seen impacted my near and dear ones. I have not gone in search of those stories to write this book. No. Stories came in search of me (you can relate to this if you may have read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert). They came to me. They happened.
When I tell you these stories, I am just sharing the things that happened to me, in my life. I am definitely not writing these stories with the intention of moving the world as the title says, but only to bring attention to the fact that stories are energy. Let stories find you. Allow them to travel through you, and like light, I hope they make everything better for you.