It was a riot of colours as school children of all ages and background converged at Delhi’s Sanskriti school in Chankyapuri and tried their hand at short stories, non- fiction, poetry, illustrated stories, and haiku for the Katha CBSE 2013 finals. The writings of hundreds of budding authors in all sizes, shapes and colours covered the display walls — awaiting evaluation and certification by a host of publishers and teachers who had arrived for the event.
Nurturing creative writers
The Katha Utsav 2013 was a journey in the discovery of writing talent for students from 500 CBSE schools in India. From 3,500 entries of creative writings submitted by registered CBSE school students from all over the country in October, 600 were selected for the finals to be held at the Sanskriti school. The four-day finals to enhance reading and writing skills in schools that were held from the 27 to 31 December, at the Sanskriti school was actually a well thought out coaching event. The writers’ workshop to enhance the skills of students and adults had a unique interaction phase with the parents as well. It was a priceless mentoring of young authors and creative talent.
The finals did not end in simply choosing the traditional top three talents as most competitions do, but went on to enhance the skills of all 600 winning students by providing them with first-hand interaction from top story-telling talents. They included the young Ankit Chadha (also a hit with students at the JLF 2014), renowned haiku poet Kala Ramesh, and writer, illustrator and story teller Srivi Kalyan. If you had inkling of talent as a story teller, Katha Utsav aimed at nurturing and enhancing it.
Katha founder and award winning writer Geeta Dharmarajan and Sadhna Parasher, CBSE director of academics, deserve praise for limiting the massive exercise to a level-one talent hunt and taking it further.
Building reading and writing skills
Dharmarajan, over the last 25 years, has painstakingly built a publishing house that is entirely focused on improving the reading and writing skills of all school-going children including street children. The Katha journey started in 1988 with a magazine called Tamasha aimed at first generation school goers. UNICEF and the Government of Delhi helped take it to Delhi’s slums, and later on the Government of Rajasthan adopted it for its school children. Soon it turned into the Khazana experiment in the Govindpuri slum cluster of Delhi — a school for street children which evolved further into an informal education program for street children before initiation into formal schools. In 2008, Katha’s ‘I love reading’ program received a boost with the support of the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.
In 2009, Katha began to scale up its effort to induce a larger number of children to read and eventually take up formal education and the Delhi government MCD schools provided the opportunity. It now works with children and teachers of MCD schools to ensure that each child achieves grade-level reading. Whereas Katha’s strength has been the ability to bring in narration and rich illustration to its text to create primary level interest amongst non-readers, its weakness is its inability to scale up its content to achieve commercial success as a publishing house. The future of niche publishing houses doing commendable work for the society is endangered unless they are scaled up to the next level. There is constant danger that without the constant infusion of capital, their ability to build on their creditable and valuable work will be lost
26
