Asansol Udan, a youth organisation, taking up initiatives voicing against gender crack and campaigning for gender equality for last decade. We have called for various right based movements in Asansol safeguarding the rights of women, children and nature along with discussion regarding toxic masculine practices both men and women become prey of. Any futuristic development has to take into account the root causes, not only the symptoms. While rehearsing the dialogues between the consciousness and the unaware stream of suppression subtly caused by gender frames, we have noted that it all starts from the lullabies we sing to children, the songs we humm while conveying to them the expectations of society and parents from them to the syllabi that we provide to them. As childhood is the foundation of a being, we feel that attending to their specific needs and necessities are something that as adults we all should be concerned about.

Asansol Udan has come up with ‘Golper Bakso/Kahani ka dabba’ – a project solely based on dedicated storytelling, interactions and exhibition of the creative minds. Since the textbooks prescribed to our children play a pivotal role, we aim at producing and compiling some stories from our surrounding that would be empowering for the children both socially and psychologically. The basic stress would be on the very important life skills ascribed by WHO for growth of a balanced and productive individual. Along with the already practised curriculum, we are aiming to add the basic value education, gender sensitisation and the life skills to strengthen their learning. The stories and the interactions would fetch to find out the components of their everyday life that are vital and can be addressed to, to create an atmosphere of gender positivity. This project shall also take into account the parents and teachers in order to complete the circle we all are standing by.

We have chosen a few schools and would target students of 13 – 17 years old in the engaging sessions. We have chosen storytellers to lead the project. The project would run for initially a year. Each day, the sessions would roll for 1 hour or 2. The classrooms would be decorated in a child-friendly and theatrical manner using various props. At end of each month, together with the children, we would aim at arranging for wall magazines reflecting their ideas and tales. At an interval of 6 months, we have planned for meeting up the parents and extending our ideas to them through the writings or drawings or telling of their own children. At the end of the entire session of a year, we would call for a closing event where we would present the graph of alterations in front of the teachers, parents and people from other schools as well. This is initially the rough planning. We are working on some tools to assess baseline measurements of the children so that we can have a reflection of the results both qualitatively as well as quantitatively.