Story Mirror On The Wall

Long time ago there used to be a princess by name Snow White. She lost her mother when she was very young and was being brought up by her stepmother, who became the Queen by virtue of her marriage to the king. She ill-treated snow White, made her do all the hard and dirty work and did not let her groom herself.

Every day the queen sat in front of the mirror, beautifully dressed and would ask "mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of all." The mirror would say, "the Queen". This scene would be daily repeated for a very long time and the mirror always replied," the Queen". The queen took pride in her beauty. But to the queen's shock, one day the mirror replied," the Snow White." The queen summoned Snow White and was dismayed to note that indeed the little Snow White had turned into a young beauty and was fair and attractive. From that day onwards the queen turned increasingly cruel towards Snow White and planned to get rid of her.  She assigned one of her men to kill her. But the man took pity on Snow White and left her in the middle of the deep forest to die and she eventually met seven dwarfs who took good care of who her and protected her, that is how the fairy tale goes.

The Scene shifts. It is 21st century and the place is world wide web and in that to be precise, it is www.story mirror.com. The web site hosts a huge community of writers who are talented and upcoming story writers and poets in different Indian languages. For the story mirror, the identity of the authors is their literary work. It would judge its authors by their work, and it would be an unbiased judgement. The writers had the powers to see their own reflection in the story mirror and found their works the most interesting and they considered themselves the most talented. The reflection in the mirror includes some of their flaws also, and if the writers noticed them and corrected them, they could refine the image. Interestingly, the writers could also see the image of fellow authors in the story mirror and also had the possibility to comment and like their work.

Whether Story Mirror wanted to spruce up the lives of its writers' community or may be just wanted to change their outlook we do not know but it held a unique competition, hitherto unknown in world literature circles, which was called as Non-stop November T30 cup edition. All the writers of story mirror were randomly distributed into five teams and all the writers were given a theme or topic for each day and had to write a story or poem in their chosen language, only on the topic of the day. Everyone participated enthusiastically. They had to read and judge the articles posted by their teammates, as part of the competition, which they did diligently so as to get the best scores. They encouraged one another and understood that they had to be together and appreciate each other's work, to be winners. The works of each team was reviewed by a team of editors and the teams and writers were evaluated by the number of submissions and editorial scores they got for their works and so on.

Individual prizes were linked to collective performances. A winner is the one who can applaud at the success of others. In this game it appeared that the entire writers' community was winners. Close friendships were forged, and lifetime bonds were created. The game succeeded beyond expectations of everyone. An event just started as a game turned out to become a fairy tale, talked about by everyone, enjoyed by everyone and it was the first of its kind of competition and a memorable event.

(Congratulations and thanks to Story Mirror team for the efforts taken to conduct this great game)