This is the blog about the famous siblings: Awe & Wonder. Few treat them as twins, because they often get mistaken for each other due to similar feel & style. But a mother knows the difference. I plan to establish the siblings’ connection with the Story. How both awe & wonder were adopted by Story, who raised them as her own. Let me share three stories for you to figure out the connection between them.
Story of Surrender, January 2024
As our car navigated through the mountain road, I was mesmerised by the breathtaking scenery outside my window. It was almost midnight, and we were returning to our chalet at Bergün after another long day at Davos. There stood rows of gigantic, breathtaking Swiss Alps, standing tall beneath a tapestry of stars and a full, bright moon. To my surprise, snow shimmered. Until then, I hadn’t known that snow glows in the moonlight because this was the first snow experience in my 40 years. (I know that’s difficult to digest. But I have lived in plains for all my life.)
I just kept looking at the shimmering snow. It was having a strange numbing effect on my senses. I was so moved that tears rolled down my cheeks. I asked my friend, Mikel, who was driving, to stop the car. I needed to step out. I needed to feel and dissolve myself in the beauty. The January night froze at ten degrees below zero. But I wasn’t feeling cold. I felt something else. I felt being part of those magnificent snow-covered caps. I felt insignificant. As if I were a small speck witnessing the magical nature. Nothingness enveloped me. All I could do was sit by the roadside, my arms wide open in Shah Rukh Khan style, and just immerse myself in the universal energy. I was in awe of the divinity that surrounded me. I stayed there for some time, while my three colleagues peered through the car window. They must have thought I had gone crazy. If it weren’t for them, I could have happily stayed there all night, willing to be frozen to death.
I had read ‘Daffodils’ as a schoolgirl. I did not know then that I was being given a container I would need thirty years later, on a road in Bergün, Switzerland, when the only language I had for what I was seeing came from a poem about a different vista entirely. Even today, just like Wordsworth’s Daffodils, those snow-covered shimmering Swiss Alps in the backdrop of a full moon flash upon my inward eye and fill my heart with love and bliss.
Story of Becoming, Autumn of 1993
There was no laptop, no Google, in fact, no home computer at our disposal. Still, the eleven-year-old girl (yes, that’s me) sat on the floor of her room with a pair of scissors and a glue stick with magazines & newspaper cuttings scattered across the floor, while a chart-paper lay rolled by her side. She was working on a scrapbook, the only thing she knew how to build with what she had. Every cutting had three common keywords – Steven Spielberg, Jurassic Park, and Dinosaur.
Autumn of 1993 was the first time I had watched a movie in a theatre. I was eleven then. Our school took us to watch Jurassic Park at Sheila Theatre, New Delhi. For the first time, I was experiencing the grandeur of storytelling. Imagine your first movie on the big screen, and that too having the gargantuan dinosaurs ready to jump out of the screen. I must have jumped from my seat more than a few times, but I didn’t blink for 127 minutes. I couldn’t fathom how come dinosaurs looked so real. How were these dinosaurs created?
I returned home with a kind of story fever. The dinosaurs were still inside me, very much alive. The way the brachiosaurus had lifted its head, the way Sam Neill had taken off his sunglasses, and the way I had not blinked.
I needed to figure out the story behind this story. So, I collected last month’s newspapers & magazines. I cut out every information I could find. I had found an article somewhere that mentioned an 8mm camera and a train crash, and I had read it nine times. His other films, which I had not yet seen but had decided I would: E.T., Jaws, and Indiana Jones. Then the dinosaurs. A double-page spread for the T-rex with a caption I had written in pencil and gone over twice in blue marker: ‘The most realistic dinosaur ever made for a film.’ The velociraptor pages. The brachiosaurus, which was my favourite, because she had been the one who made me sit up in my seat. Then the technology: the animatronics, the CGI, words I had never met before and now circled in red.
From that day to today, watching movies on the big screen is an exciting experience. I become the same eleven-year-old every single time. A good story fills me with wonder. I want to be part of it. I want to create it. Be it Christopher Nolan or Sanjay Leela Bhansali, they both stir my soul. They make me crave greatness. Master storytellers like George Orwell and Daniel Quinn become my ancestors. They nudge me. And my heart desires to read or watch every story I possibly can in my lifetime. That’s what wonder does; it makes you do things. That’s what I have been doing all my life: reading, writing & watching stories.
Story of Inheritance, Late 80s India
My third story is about my grandmother, my ammaji. I am so sure the first storyteller was a grandmother. For me at least, she was.
Storytelling has been an oral tradition for most of human history. Women, especially older ones played a significant role in keeping traditions and culture alive through stories. Folklore was originally part of women’s scope of work.
Let’s travel to late eighties India. I must have been 6-7 years old. I remember sleeping outside during the summer nights. Every evening, the backyard would be splashed with water, cots would be laid, bedsheets spread, and a huge cooler would be set to throw misty cool air. We kids would be so excited with all this hustle-bustle. Our backyard was followed by a kitchen garden, and the boundary wall had guava, peach and mango trees. I remember this one night very clearly. The wind was blowing, and with that we heard the rustling of leaves. I looked at the trees; after all, they were making this scary sound, and I was sure I saw something there. A moving shadow.
I hugged my grandmother tight and said, “Ammaji, I think there is someone sitting on the mango tree.”
She laughed and told me, “Yes, there is, and I am aware of that.”
I looked up at her with disbelief, as if she had grown two heads, trying to comprehend if my grandmother could have befriended a ghost.
But to my utter surprise, she told me, “It’s Hanuman who is sitting on the tree. The monkey God is watching over us because I had told him so.”
With a relieved sigh, I asked, “Does he listen to you?”
Smilingly, she replied, “Yes, of course. Dare he not. I have told him explicitly. I pray to you so that you look after my children. He is watching over us; sleep, my girl, no ghost or demon can enter our premise with him on the watch. ”
I remember I kept looking at the trees and their shadows for a long time. I was sure I could see Hanuman fighting a demon in real time. This way, instead of looking at the stars, which were bountiful at that time, I was taught to meet the dark eye to eye. Not through reason, not through moral discourse, but through a story.
The next day, a six-year-old me went jumping to school. Why wouldn’t I? After all, my ammaji was powerful enough to bully a God! I was completely in awe of her. I told this story to all my friends. I too wanted to be powerful like her, so I started taking part in anything & everything related to the monkey God, Hanuman. My wonder made me learn about him, and before I became aware, I had started praying. A story had planted the first seeds of faith in me.
Did you realise what ammaji did that day? She flipped the story and told me a new one. With the new story, she instilled awe & wonder in me.
Connecting the Dots
The moment we step into awe, we are a part of grandeur/divinity. We might not understand, but we do feel it. It uplifts us. I remain in awe often. That’s like my default state. Every time I read a book with an amazing story or watch a movie with an exceptional storyline, I am in awe. I too want to touch it, feel it, make sense of it. I just completely immerse myself in the story, so much so that it becomes a part of me. I think this effect lingers longer if it’s a book I have read. It’s as if entering a time capsule and being stuck in that time zone. The wonder these stories evoke pulls me like gravity to create such stories, to be part of this story universe, to learn the craft of storytelling, and to tell a tale. To become Shruti 6.0.
The story arrives in three modes: encountered, received, and inherited. The Alps gave me an encounter that demanded a story. Jurassic Park gave me a story that remade me. Ammaji gave me a story before I could question it. Three different doors leading to the same room. The story room of awe and wonder.
Story is the fertile land upon which awe & wonder prosper in the human mind.
Take a moment to think: Which stories evoked awe in you? Which stories stayed with you forever? Which stories do you go back to, again and again? Which ones made you wonder?
Which stories have become beliefs so deeply ingrained that they are a part of your core personality? The stories we love tell us a lot about ourselves. Pay attention to your awe moments and the wonders that surround you, and you will find your story in hindsight.
Wonder inspires the wish to understand; awe inspires the wish to let it shine, to surrender, to acknowledge, and to unite. – Ulrich Weger & Johannes Wagemann
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