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Pratham Books Champion : Subrat Goswami

As the International Year of the Forest draws to a close, we are running the ‘Awareness Today for a Greener Tomorrow’ campaign. We asked our AWESOME community if they would be volunteer to become a Pratham Books Champion and conduct storytelling sessions based on the book “A King Cobra’s Summer’. And again, our friends volunteered eagerly. We will be sharing the stories of all our champions through our blog. 


Today’s story comes from Subrat Goswami who conducted a storytelling session in Mahabadia village (district Bhopal). Subrat works with the Archaeological Survey of India. Apart from observing the wide gap that exists between different classes of society, Subrat also realized that many people have the means to contribute to society but don’t know how or whom to support. Subrat decided to utilize his weekends to work with rural kids and women. Thus, Ahambhumika was started in Bhopal. Ahambhumika has received enormous support from many people they have connected to through social media and all current initiatives are being run by individual contributions only (not by government or corporate support).
This is the second time that Subrat has volunteered to conduct a storytelling session. You can read about his previous storytelling session here.
 Ahambhumika has started a new initative to educate girl child of stone crushers in a village Mahabadia. This initiative named as Mahak (Flavour) had the privilege of having a story telling session within its opening of 7 days. This education centre which opened on 11.12.2011 aims to provide basic   education to the girl child between the age group of 5-12 years of village Mahabadia from 3-5 PM every day except Monday. These girl  children look after the complete household work after their parents are off to the field.
Today we had the story telling session in this informal education centre due to the support of Pratham Books.These girl children who have just started learning and listened with immense interest and rapt attention to the story of Kaala (King Cobra’s summer ).  The session started with the briefing that what Pratham Books is and how  Pratham Books is helping thousands  of kids by providing them books on variety of topics with minimum cost. 
Then, the story telling session started. The children were involved with the story and they were questioned during the storytelling session. When asked how many of them  have seen a snake, most of the hands were raised as seeing a snake is not a new thing for these village children.
Thereafter, they were asked to show the height of the King Kobra which one of the girls showed by spreading her hands. Likewise the session went on which started at 3.15 PM and ended at 4.30 P.M. Children listened with attention and enjoyed it a lot.They also saw the book ‘King Cobra’s Summer’ during and after the session with  great interest and appreciated the drawings made on it. Subrat Goswami along with Asma Khan and Usma Khan told the story to the girl children   
 

These girl children were told that if they will learn drawing and painting, one day they too could draw illustrations like this. And tomorrow these girl children will be provided with drawing and sketching materials.


Thank you Subrat and team for spreading the joy of reading!

Click here to read the stories sent in by all the Pratham Books Champions.

Note : If any of you want to be a Pratham Books Champion and join us on our journey of getting ‘a book in every child’s hand’, write to us at web(at)prathambooks(dot)org.


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