Arriving first in Kolkata, the team met with colleagues at banglanatak.com, a fantastic social enterprise, based in West Bengal, but working across India, using culture to promote inclusive and sustainable development. They were able to follow up on conversations with Ananya Bhattacharya, Director and Cofounder, who visited Loughborough in July 2025 as a Visiting International Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, as part of the events celebrating Loughborough’s important relationship with UNESCO.

Whilst in Kolkata (and whilst Rob was visiting the Bannabagram Baul Ashram with banglanatak.com, to witness traditional arts, crafts and performance), Mike and Fred ran a storytelling workshop for the British Council, focussing on storytelling as a means for exploring emotion and mental well-being. In Medinipur Mike also delivered the 2^nd Tapan Jyoti Bandyopadhyay Memorial Lecture at Vidyasagar University, another of our UNESCO partners, on ‘Storytelling and Sustainability’.

From Kolkata, Mike, Fred and Rob travelled to Hyderabad in the south of India, where they were hosted by VNRVJIET, an engineering institution, where they have been developing plans to deliver teacher training on storytelling. Mike and Fred also took the opportunity to run a couple of digital storytelling workshops with engineering students and Rob gave a guest lecture on Urban Graphic Heritage, before visiting the extraordinary Golkonda Fort in the city.

For the second week, the team moved onto Mumbai, where they were joined by Alma Solarte-Tobon. They were guests of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, where, in collaboration with Professor Asha Banu Soletti, they have been building a programme of storytelling training for mental health practitioners. In addition they visited the village of Aghai in Shahapur Taluk, 150 kms from Mumbai, where Asha and her team have been running Pragati (Integrated Rural Health Development Project), and where they were honoured guests at the village school prizegiving.

Mike writes, “This was a hugely productive couple of weeks, where we cemented existing friendships, forged new ones and laid the foundations for collaborations across research, training and teaching under the auspices of the UNESCO Chair for Storytelling Education for Sustainability. And if this wasn’t enough, we also found time to take in a couple of cricket matches, as part of the T20 World Cup in Kolkata and Mumbai!”