Bhubaneswar: The Bakul Storytelling Festival concluded at the Bakul Library in Satyanagar after making hundreds of children and parents sing, dance and enjoy listening to the best storytellers of the state.
This is the third edition of the Bakul Storytelling Festival, which is organised during the Summer vacation to feed the growing appetite of children for stories, an appetite Bakul is credited with having created.
This Storytelling Festival featured the best-known professional storytellers of the city, such as Prachi Tara, Meera Das, Saswati Nanda Satpathy, some of the very popular teacher storytellers, such as Tapaswini Panda from Mother’s Public School and Bidyut Lata from KIIT International School. The festival was curated by Mr Sujit Mahapatra, the founder of Bakul Foundation and the curator of the storytelling festivals for which Bhubaneswar is now renowned all over the world.
It must be mentioned that Bakul Foundation has been organising the BhuFeSto or the Bhubaneswar Festival of Storytelling, which has been called by the best international storytellers as one of the best storytelling festivals in the world. Similarly, during the Covid years, Bakul Foundation hosted Storytime @ 9 on its YouTube channel, in which the best storytellers from 50 different countries participated and it is the best such storytelling resource online. Bakul also organised the very popular Rabibaar Gapabaar in which the best storytellers from Odisha participated.
Sujit says proudly, “The 1st BhuFeSto was an eye-opener to people in Odisha. They didn’t know of the possibilities of oral storytelling, and that it could be a popular event. The online storytelling series after BhuFeSto made many adults and children aspire to be good storytellers. I feel proud that we have created an ecosystem around storytelling better than anywhere else in India, perhaps.”
The 1st edition of the Bakul Storytelling Festival was an attempt to demonstrate that now, storytellers in Odisha have arrived and we could pull off a festival just by ourselves. In each edition, Bakul has been trying to scout for new talent. This time, Anukul Mohanty from Sambalpur has joined the community of storytellers.
There were all kinds of stories in the festival, from the popular and humorous Odia folktale of Chakulia Panda told by Tapaswini Panda, to Saswati Nanda Satpathy, who told a moving tale on the relationship between humans and animals and the need to be sensitive to the needs of animals. Sarmistha Panda, an IT professional and trained Odissi dancer, told the story of Bhasmasura, while Sujit told the story of a girl who hated books, and who accidentally then fell in love with books.
According to Shruti Kanungo, Coordinator of the Festival, “The success of the Bakul Storytelling Festival can be seen in the fact that this year, there are so many storytellers that Bakul is organising 2 different storytelling festivals. This one featured 18 adult storytellers, and we will have another Storytelling Festival in June in which the children, who are listening to the storytellers, can be storytellers themselves.”
