I see “experts” selling storytelling frameworks every day. Slides, hooks, formulas, and templates. It is all theory, with zero demonstration of the thing itself.
But recently, I watched someone actually do it.
I had signed up for a session called “Writing Right For Young Adults” at the Selangor Children’s Literature Festival for my daughter. When she fell sick, I went to take her seat. I didn’t realize the workshop was three hours long until thirty minutes before it started. I braced myself for boredom. Who has the time to sit through a three-hour seminar in our hyper-distracted, digital-forsaken era?
I walked in late. The speaker was a barefoot Indian woman in her sixties. She stood next to a paper flip-chart, holding a microphone. No slides. No pacing. No shouting. None of the aggressive theatrics modern speakers use to artificially inflate engagement.
In my years of business and presenting, the night before a pitch was always the most anxious part. Trimming slides. Repositioning layouts. Praying the visual polish would keep the audience in awe.
And here she was—paper chart, mic, nothing else—and thirty people in that room had their eyes and ears completely locked on her. The only time I checked my phone in three hours was when my wife messaged me an update on my daughter.
That is what a storyteller in action actually looks like.
Her name was Manisha Chaudhry—author, translator, and Director of Jaipur BookMark. But it wasn’t just how she held the room; it was the essence of what she taught that shifted my entire perspective.
She said something worth sitting with: not every story needs to make sense.
Think about Batu Belah Batu Bertangkup, Pak Pandir, or The Pied Piper. When you are a child, you don’t scrutinize the logic. You just consume the narrative.
It took me back to Standard 5. My English teacher had picked a story for me to perform: A dragon demands to eat a princess, or it will burn the kingdom to the ground. The princess suggests stuffing a doll with chili. The dragon devours it, chokes, and dies.
When I became a father, I retold that exact story to my daughter, Maryam. I told it so many times that I started inventing new, pure-nonsense plots on the fly. She would roll her eyes, but she always asked me to tell it again.
Looking back, the dragon story makes absolutely no sense. Why is a fire-breathing dragon negotiating a peace treaty?
But Manisha explained exactly why that doesn’t matter. Most children’s stories aren’t logic puzzles; they are time capsules. You plant them in a child’s head as a memory. Years later, when those memories surface, the child brings the questions back to their parents. The plot was never the point. The real purpose is to build an architecture for critical thinking, social interaction, and emotional framing.
Then she asked a question I haven’t been able to shake since: Should we only write stories with happy endings?
Does reading something heartbreaking traumatize a child? Or does feeding them a strict diet of sanitized, guaranteed happy endings leave them completely unequipped for the reality they will actually grow into—a reality that includes a war in Gaza?
We treat children’s storybooks like simple entertainment. They aren’t. They are the baseline code for how a child learns to process a broken world.
That is the actual power of storytelling.
Clarity is the most underrated business investment. — Lokman S., BIKIN