Flash Fiction Fever

Can you tell a captivating tale in just 140 characters? Yes, you can! Chintan Ruparel and Anuj Gosalia, the charming young founders of Terribly Tiny Tales, India’s largest story telling platform, tell you how

- Joanne Natalia

Terribly Tiny Tales aka TTT are the pioneers of getting flash fiction into digital space. Catering to shortening attention spans, they merged text with photo to deliver tales in less than 140 characters. They began as just a Facebook page, but now have a YouTube Channel called Terribly Tiny Talkies, and also a TTT app besides selling TTT merchandise online. “The art of storytelling will never go, it will always keep evolving or changing as per the time we live in,” says Chintan, “and we sort of reflect that.”

Enabling short storytelling that moves people is what they stand for and they insist on calling themselves ‘enablers’, not ‘creators’. Chintan and Anuj say the reason they aren’t in the limelight often is because they want to celebrate their writers out there and do more for the community, in terms of giving everyone a chance to get published and then grow.

TTT began in the march of 2013 as a response to the trend of people not reading books but preferring to spend time on the internet: jumping from one hyperlink to another and reading memes. Anuj thought that the internet had become a very shallow space and there was a need for meaningful stories and content. “And meaningful doesn’t necessarily mean deep—although a lot of people think of us as that now—but something that is short and entertaining without being shallow. So, that’s pretty much how the idea of TTT came about,” adds Anuj. He pulled together a team of 15 of the best writers he knew, which is when he met Chintan, and kick-started the TTT Facebook page, parallelly running an advertising company called Not Like That to pay the bills. They tried to do interesting work with Not Like That, but it was still advertising and after a year and a half, as TTT began to pickup speed, they decided it was time to switch gears.