Meet Sara, a 10-year-old sports-loving children's storyteller

Imagine firing up your child’s imagination, inculcating good knowledge and helping to fuel opinions from an early age, all in one. Most of all, children will integrate a topic they seemingly enjoy knowing about, and that may help them develop a lifelong love of reading. Meet Sara, a ten-year-old fictional sports-loving athlete, who has become no less than a sporting sensation in young minds with her tremendous insight and ability to draw an audience in.

“Sara is India's first sports-loving female character for kids. She knows her sports and also loves some drama, which helps her make sports stories way more interesting, by not only focussing upon the technique but also the players as real people who make the game come alive for children,” says Nidhi Mishra, the founder and CEO of Bookosmia. Interestingly, the stories narrated by Sara on the platform create the characteristic distance between the readers and the players, where the children as readers end up sharing the exhilaration of enjoying the spectacle all at once.

Nidhi Mishra, Founder & CEO of Bookosmia (Source: Bookosmia.com)

The other way of looking at it, as Nidhi says, is how these stories can help children learn about good sportsmanship, perseverance, and other positive characteristics and values, besides being abreast of any developments in the sporting spectrum. Today, the focus on sports content is also fast growing in the country. In this situation, what source of information could be more efficient than an engaging first-person narration by somebody of the same age group?

Now the lovable grandma who would usually narrate a cascade of beautiful imageries that once carved out in our young minds is just a click away with Bookosmia having more interesting content on offer. Named as the ‘Sara’s Corner’, the section furnishes a list of distinctive tales on the recently-concluded Women’s T20 World Cup, ranging from match predictions and interviews to best anecdotal stories on cricketers.

For instance, children, within fiction stories, can learn about players who defy the odds or break through barriers to make a positive impact. “Her father decided to get her a very short haircut and took her to a cricket club disguised as a boy. She was accepted and not just that, she destroyed the bowlers with her big hits!” reads a sentence in ‘Did someone say cricket is a boy’s game?’ Another story explicates how one should need to learn from failure and losing, more so than the act of winning and that perfect games are a rarity, through India’s loss against Australia in the final of the World Cup despite the side’s stupendous show in the group league stage.

Source: Facebook / Bookosmia.com

“The primary reason for launching a female narrator (Sara) was to break the stereotypes that we have. As much as we talk about empowering women in our daily lives, I feel there is not much content that can change our beliefs. The message is that girls don’t necessarily need to play with their Barbie dolls all the time nor should they always worry about wearing pink dresses. They can still stand out. Sara is the character who brings these thoughts alive and somebody who breaks the stereotypes. These kind of stereotypes usually come very early and it is necessary that children know about it. It is as much inspirational for a girl as much as it is for a boy when they see a woman talking about sports. It is to normalise the conversation that sports is not just for a man!” explains Nidhi.

Well, if you are wondering about the kind of stories that can best help your child develop a creative personality, then certainly look no further than our very own ‘Sara’s Corner’ on Bookosmia. With a variety of fiction and biographical stories bordering Indian sports, know it all through the eyes of the ten-year-old Sara. Happy reading, folks!