Mumbai: Every year March 08 is celebrated as International Women’s Day. People from different walks of life join the various campaigns to celebrate the occasion on empowering women, strengthening female power and making their life more beautiful. On this occasion, SkillOutlook presents a woman who is scripting success in her professional field and creating value for society in a unique way – the art of storytelling.

Sherin Mathews, a storyteller, a therapist and a trainer based in Mumbai, is on ambitious drive for fosters confidence and beliefs in young minds through the medium of storytelling.  Through her firm Storynest, Ms Mathews has taken up this assignment to train young mass, students and corpoprate professionals on the art of storytelling.

Story telling as a medium through which formative years of young minds are tuned to become aware of the resources necessary to find answers within each person.  Storynest stories are both adapted and original works are carefully selected to present the possible choices one could be faced with in life.

Ms Mathews said “I remember telling stories of all the books and comics I use to read to my friends at school and later in college of books and movies. Once a friend told me, “If I am listening to you , I don’t need to watch the movie. I knew I could tell but I never knew it was a profession or I could be a Professional Storyteller until a few years ago.”

I went to Kathalaya Bangalore to train formally in Storytelling by Mrs Geeta Ramanujan. It got me hooked to storytelling and opened a wide door to what all storytelling can do and where all it can be used. Since then she is conducting storytelling workshops for children at schools.

Ms Mathews has been selected recently to go to Iran, where she entered the finalist round.  She opined “I was amazed at how much energy a country had invested in terms of manpower, time, people, intellect, etc for their children. I have never seen storytelling being held as such a mega event anywhere before. The cultural richness of their nation can only be imagined and people and kids came by thousands to listen to storytellers.”