"If knowledge is not palatable to the brain, it will never be retained. Oral traditions continue till date only because they are a way of weaving information with stories," shares Chittaranjan Park-resident Somi Chatterjee (38). As a way of inculcating different kinds of skills, be it research, use of artificial intelligence, among others, through storytelling, Chatterjee founded One Station Million Stories (OSMS) in 2017.
The idea behind the initiative -- it attempts to use digital technology to improve a person's relationship with an object or a space -- originated from Chatterjee's master's thesis on the topic of Heritage Economics in 2008. "If you look at the broader ambit of economics, we can make a number of social changes based on Heritage. Through stories it is possible to provide complex content to a relatively younger generation who do have a personal connection with the historic resources," she shares.
A feast from the past
Their pilot venture 'Historical Gastronomica: The Indus Dining Experience', organised in February 2020, was a six-day food exhibition on Indus Valley held at the National Museum, Central Secretariat.
The venture exhibited the different kinds of food that people living in the Indus civilization must have consumed. "Indus food is an intangible concept. While we have seen the pots and pans used at that time, we have no idea what people actually did with them. This exhibition was therefore a way of giving imagination a form."
The menu featured spices such as turmeric, mustard, coriander, etc., different kinds of grains, pulses, as well as vegetables that would have been available during the winter at that time. "The idea was to imagine how these products would have been treated during those times and how the taste might have been different being cooked in one of the ancient vessels," she adds.
Treating the Indus Valley Civilization as a stepping stone to narrate the concept of human and food evolution, Chatterjee shares, "First we mentally fed the food to the viewers so that when they actually ate each food they realised how special these were. We wanted people to start appreciating everyday kitchen food."
Speaking of the reception of this exhibition, she adds, "There were farmers from Bastar who had attended the exhibition. We had different kinds of grains on display and one of the farmers picked it up and said 'Humara DNA in me hai aur inka DNA hum me hai' (Our DNA is in them and their DNA is in us). That was a very strong statement about human culture and practices."
A novel attempt at skill-building
Chatterjee shares that in the last two decades, the world is now on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, which is now Information Technology-oriented. OSMS's aim is to therefore inculcate different kinds of modern-day skills such as the use of information technology or even Artificial and Virtual Reality to disseminate content. For this, they also organised a number of workshops for both adults and children.
One of OSMS' most well-received projects has been the Maavadu Tales.
The first session of this virtual creative workshop was organised for children between the ages of eight to 12 in August 2020. The workshop takes the children on a journey of the history of a Mango as told to a baby mango (Maadavu) by its mother mango (Maangai).
"Through the workshop, the children were also encouraged to plant a seed of a mango, so that they have something to take back and look forward to in a year, after the end of a workshop," shares Chatterjee.
Keeping this in mind, OSMS is planning on organising another Maavadu Tales workshop in August 2022 to look back at how the seed the children had planted had evolved into a tree.