Movie Once Upon A Time In Mumbai

[Jayme Bostic]

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Once upon a time on February 17, 1803, in Bombay (now Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra State, India), people in the vicinity saw a cloud of thick smoke and heard screams, "Help! Fire-Fire! That was coming from the Fort that housed around 10,000 odd people. Bombay, which was then the headquarters of the East India Company on India's west coast of the Arabian Sea, was then a city within a fort, both residential and business activities happened unsegregated in and around the fort vicinity, which had grown as a center for the burgeoning cotton trade and therefore made it the most desirable place for storing goods. Cotton bales, oil, and other flammable material stored in the open and the many buildings in the Fort made of the woven mat, a thatched roof of sorts, comprising leaves of the coconut trees was a place most ideal for a fire disaster if it were to happen. The after-effects of the fire were disastrous leading to loss of lives that prompted to the segregation of residences from the business establishments, a plan for a new town with wider roads with better use of space and a designated fire brigade station for addressing future such events, until which unskilled locals handled carts and horse chariots, the only means to extinguish fires wherever and whenever possible.

Every city learns from its mistakes and grows for the better, and Bombay learned it the harder way. This urban historical catastrophe resulted then in an immediate institutional change. Committees set up, and decisions were taken quickly on the learnings that emerged from the fire. Our experiences shape us as who we are and help create the meaning and therefore create our ecosystem. This horrific experience brought in a great sense of understanding of Firestopping then as a mandatory design aspect of infrastructure and emphasized its due importance in the minds of the decision-makers.

So, we too have a share of our historical Fire disasters as the cities of London(1666) and Chicago (1871) that made us smarter by the day, and reading and learning about this story and a piece of history, I am sure would make you remember and learn from "The Great Mumbai Fire Of 1803" for a long time.

The idea of narrating the story is multifold, and before you start reading this any further, I would want you to grow small and enjoy the experience as you did in your childhood days. Absurd? How do you grow small after you have grown big already? Simple, remember those days when you went into a different world altogether, listening to those many stories that began with "Once upon a time"? Next was magic, where you just couldn't stop and wanted to listen to more of them. These stories gave you those life lessons (subconsciously, of course) that stayed with you for a lifetime.

Stories are recognizable patterns, and in those patterns, we find meaning. They are the signal within the noise. Being privileged to have a professional career with umpteen opportunities and experience on both sides of the learning system (as a student and an expert trainer) in my consulting and training career spanning two decades now, The knowledge delivery method that I can vouch to having the best impact is through storytelling.

Most of us think we'll read or maybe listen to something one time and get it. But the problem is that it doesn't work that way. There are too many things competing for the attention of our minds. When you listen to something interesting, we tend to do it repeatedly and understand it, which manages to cut through the noise, and you realize that this is important However, it's always a challenge to follow this process and even more challenging to master it to perfection.

It's an exciting challenge wherein the books and manuals relevant to our professional learning fail to stimulate us even once (leave reading them, again and again, to be well understood) unless there's a professional compulsion to pass exams or any mandatory needs of the business.

Mythical fire breathing dragons as we've become today professionally being always on the edge of our seats with little or no attention span at all times, thereby making it an uphill task to be able to focus on the final objective of quality professional learning, and therefore the job isn't that easy. The most effective way forward is using storytelling as a tool to generate interest and kickstart our subject learnings to understand concepts we wish we knew about more comprehensively.

Making this happen through stories would help us not only address short-term tasks (clearing exams) but, most importantly, help gain true professional wisdom in our fields of expertise, thereby making a valuable contribution to the business and the industry we serve.

This painstaking and patient effort to make it all possible through storytelling for these ICT technical subject domains be recited as stories and experiences that we would love to listen to and learn from is what we have set forward to doing at "Learn to succeed."

What's made me go back to the storyboard and rewrite the art and delivery of professional ICT teaching through storytelling is an inspiration from an Indian Proverb that rightly says. "Tell me a fact, and I'll learn. Tell me the truth, and I'll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever."

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