Nitin Pai on The Story Rules Podcast
Nitin Pai, co-founder & director of the Takshashila Institution and the author of Nitopadesha, appeared on The Story Rules Podcast on Monday, July 31, 2023 and spoke about storytelling and narratives:
“Nitin talks about how narratives are at the most fundamental level about identities and how that means - we can become prisoners of our own narratives. He shares the evocative analogy of how narratives can serve as a mooring or an anchor for who we are, but can sometimes also become a straitjacket, severely constraining the space that we as societies create for ourselves
On public discourse, I liked Nitin’s frame of the four levels of stories that societies (and organisations) can grapple with. Level one being the story of ‘Who we are’, our identity; Level 2 deals with ‘What are the key problems’ that we want to focus on, Level 3 being the ‘What are the right Solutions for these problems’ and Level 4 that dealing with ‘Where do we want to go’, our vision. Unfortunately, a lot of societies often get stuck at Level 1, making very little progress on the higher levels.
In sharing these stories, there are two broad types of narratives that Nitin says we can use – narratives of hope and narratives of fear. While narratives of fear can get short term electoral gains, over time, people become tired of being fearful… and look forward to more optimistic narratives.
Nitin also shares why the medium of narrative dissemination also matters – specifically, how Nitin himself started with blogging, then got into Twitter in the early 2010s, how he got disillusioned with it and what alternatives he’s exploring now.”
