Digitally Regional

Pallav Bajjuri, co-founder of saddahaq.com, with an aim to revive the regional literature on a digital platform, launched a new venture Kahaniya.com. The website will turn one year on May 21. Kahaniya.com is not a blogging platform in specific; however, it gives an opportunity to budding writers, who can contribute stories, series and poetry. People can also download the app on their Smartphones.

Hyderabad-based Pallav after completing his high school went to the US to pursue his Bachelors and Masters in computer engineering. While doing Masters he decided to venture into the media sector. Pallav says that he came to India in 2012 and started saddahaq.com. “SaddaHaq translates news into a platform for social dialogue and community engagement and is a novel concept called social journalism.

Then in 2016, I started my new company Kahaniya to revive regional languages for primary librarian fiction. So that way we designed the Kahaniya to support Indian languages. The idea behind Kahaniya is, any storytellers can visit ‘Kahaniya.com’, and write their stories without any editorial interference and they can even sell the stories online.”

Excerpts

What is the concept of Kahaniya and how does it work?
Anyone can write their stories in Indian languages like Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, etc. Also if anyone wants to read regional fictions they can visit our website and they can purchase too. It’s a very simple concept. It’s a platform for storytellers. The non-writers can also share their short stories on this website. We are mainly focused on fiction.

For any budding writer getting published is really hard as it is difficult to reach the publishers. We are in a digital era and here self-publishing is quite active and affordable. At Kahaniya one can write and publish your own story, price your own story anyway and whoever wants to read your story; they will pay you at that time, and you will pay us. This is the process.

What was the main objective to start this?
The regional languages are not that vibrant on the internet, nowadays we find only news in few regional languages, but beyond that, we don’t find any regional languages on any websites. And our ambition is to change that and bring the regional literature onto the web. We have a self-service model. The writers can do everything by themselves.

What were the challenges?
The biggest challenge for us has been operational; we talked about regional language story telling. So most of the people are in rural areas and a few are over 50 years of age. We are providing digital platforms to them, sometimes it’s hard to connect with them on the internet because they can’t always come online and write their stories. We have to train them and keep assisting them. We don’t do official training we just help them by sending videos, apart from that if they have any doubt then they contact us or else reach out to us on Skype.

How do you ensure your writers get good readership?
Typically writers have their own followers. We have prominent Telugu writers like Yandamoori Veerendranath, Malladi Venkata Krishna Murthy and Mohammad Khadeer Babu among others on Kahaniya.com. So it is a platform which caters to all.

How is the response from people?
We have around 1,000 readers from all over the world. People from different countries like Belgium, USA, Germany and UK contact us and share their feedback. And many also call us from there as they want to collaborate with our writers. It’s a very engaged community that we have.

What are your future plans?
We announced a campaign called ‘Launch Pad’, wherein we are inviting writers to submit their stories and we will pick up one best story or one best series, which we will be publishing in the form of book by Mumbai-based publishing company ‘Leadstart Publishing’, and once it is published, it will be officially launched in a ceremony by Dr Shashi Tharoor in New Delhi. The idea is to give a platform to aspiring writers. People can submit their stories by May 21 and the book will be launched in August.

By Heena Mishra