Know your candidates

Col Harsharan Singh (retd) (Rashtriya Raksha Dal):

An ex-serviceman, hotelier, Rotarian and social worker, all rolled in one is this candidate for the Chandigarh Lok Sabha seat. This is his maiden attempt to get into politics.

Colonel Harsharan Singh had his postings almost everywhere in the country, including North East, Jammu & Kashmir, during his 30-year association with Army.

After retirement, he set up a hotel in Sector 22 here which has been the venue of meetings of various political parties, human rights organisations and non-government organisations. Colonel Harsharan Singh remained President of the Hotel Association of Punjab and Chandigarh. He was also the chairman of the convention of the All-India Federation of Hotels Association held in Chandigarh in 1994. He is the Charter President of the Rotary Shivalik.

He is the candidate of the Rashtriya Raksha Dal, political wing of the All-India Ex-Services League.

Mr Mata Ram Dhiman (Bahujan Samaj Party):

The 51-year-old Mata Ram Dhiman is an academician-turned politician. A staunch supporter of Mr Kanshi Ram, electoral politics is nothing new for him. He contested the 1996 Lok Sabha elections from Chandigarh and polled more than 10,000 votes. In the 1998 poll, he supported the Congress candidate, Mr Pawan Bansal.

A graduate from Government College, Ropar, and postgraduate from Punjabi University, Patiala, Mr Dhiman heads the local unit of the Bahujan Samaj Party and is a member of various committees and subcommittees of the Chandigarh Administration.

— To be concluded

How to tell a story
Tribune News Service

CHANDIGARH, Aug 27 — "A story can itself become a theatrical experience and can be experienced in its original content and form, and this is what I try and teach", said Prof Devendra Raj Ankur from the National School of Drama (NSD), New Delhi, who arrived in the city today to conduct a three-day workshop on story telling. The workshop has been organised by the Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA), Chandigarh, at Punjab Kala Bhavan, Sector 16.

With about 35 people, mostly teachers, participating in the workshop, it was interesting to watch the initial hesitation faced by most while recounting a tale. The workshop today began with all the participants 'telling' a story about a woodcutter and adding their own inputs into it, and thus developing it into a complex tale involving smugglers, elections, authors, and also the Bollywood film industry! Many of the participating teachers seemed to be struggling to speak in front of the large gathering or even while adding imaginative bits to the tale — a sight which their students would have loved to watch!

"Teachers also have very little to do with story-telling today, because they become to attuned to the routine methods of teaching, which ultimately becomes very boring and monotonous", said Prof Ankur, whose workshop will also include dealing with the written texts in school books in "an interesting manner".

Today's programme also included an exercise on expressing a story into various styles like that of singing and recounting a story, or reading a story like a news-reader, reciting a story in the form of mathematical tables or even narrating a tale like a speech of a politician. The participants made use of all these styles and many more to recount the woodcutter's story.

According to Prof Ankur, who did a similar workshop in 1997 with the Department of Indian Theatre, Panjab University, "the tradition of story telling is very easily available to all of us, but unfortunately all of us have cut ourselves away from it because of our lifestyles. It is actually a discovery for most that drama or dramatical elements can be found within a story itself without adding any extra aids".