The Fat Cat

Today I attended an exclusive workshop about the art of storytelling by Geeta Ramanujam. She’s the founder of Kathalaya, a storytelling movement across India.

She started her day with a story-like introduction of herself. One story wove into another and never bored us. After that, she made us introduce ourselves with a story about ourselves. Then, we settled in to listen to more stories, including a folk tale that we were part of reciting. By that I mean we reacted to the song-story, which formed a part of the folktale itself.

Our big activity of the day was to work in teams to create our own little story using the elements we had talked about throughout the day. We had four words based on which we had to make and perform our story. The ones my team had were laborious, light, cat, and happy.

Here’s what we came up with…

Once upon a time, there was a fat fat cat. He was so fat, he could hardly be considered a cat anymore. One day, a bright light appeared in front of the cat. From it appeared a cat like no one had ever seen before. It was the Tiger God. “With great power comes great responsibility,” he said. He said that the cat had to perform three labors in order to keep his clowder safe. The first one was to kill a huge rattlesnake that was feeding on the kittens. Second, he had to clean the stables/litter box to make sure that his clowder was clean. Third, he had to hunt for the golden fish that would give his people health. After all three labors, the Tiger God appeared again and said that the cat had proven himself. He had earned his stripes and became a powerful tiger.

That, we claimed, was the story of how the tiger got its stripes.

Now, we had to perform this play. I got to play the fat cat, which involved loads of meowing, mewling, and growling once I became the tiger. I didn’t have many dialogues, but there were a lot of actions.

In my opinion, this was the best part of the workshop. Being part of this reminded me of my longstanding love for storytelling and entertaining.