evam Indrajit

What is evam Indrajit about?

Its a story of discontent, of unanswered questions, of repressed emotions and above all, its the story of the youth. The play discusses a number of issues that we face as a part of growing up. It raises questions such as Who are We?What are We? and Why are We? Questions that can seem so pertinent to a 22 year old looking for answers while looking equally senseless to his mother who seems to forget that there was a time when similar questions perturbed her. Its a play about Amal, Vimal, Kamal, Indrajit, Manasi and Aunty- it tracks their lives from carefree college-goers to anxious job searching professionals to the baggage of family life and through all this the Writer takes us through the rigmaroles of Indrajit's mind, his fears, apprehensions, his romance and his heart-break. The play captures the different ways in which life evolves from say a happily married couple who can't keep their hands of each other to a gruff husband who considers the newspaper to be the most important item in his "things-to-do". What happens to Indrajit?Does he find answers or does he get crushed under the weight of his questions?
For further information, please visit http://evam.in/newproductions.htm
To know more, please come and watch the play!

In the present

Went out for dinner last night with my uncle and his family. He has three daughters, my first cousins, and the eldest daughter has two kids-Nipun Bhat and Naman Bhat. They are aged 4 and 3. After a sumptuous meal at Eden, Harrington Road, we decided to stop for an ice cream. We picked up our ice cream; Nipun with a strawberry, Naman with a cornetto and me with vanilla. The three of us sat down outside the store on the steps while the rest of them went inside. So there we sat, eating our ice creams. It was a quite moment, there were cars whizzing by, with a cut tree lying a few yards away and there we sat oblivious to the machinations of the planet, just concentrating on the given task at hand. I looked at my two nephews and they looked at me and smiled and I could not help but smile back. It was an unspoken sharing of the uncorrupted pleasure of the experience and I realized that just for that one moment, I had stopped thinking about what was going to happen tomorrow, what I wanted to do with life, what is my purpose and just for that one moment I lived in the present. I felt strong and vulnerable at the same time.

My nephews never stop amazing me, every time I see them. The things they notice, pick up and how they use this knowledge and suddenly in another instant they are back to being 4 and 3, running all around me senselessly and making me dizzy. Another instant, one hangs from my back while the other clings to me from the front and then they expect me to stomp around the place. God I miss the trivialities of childhood!!!

New play in the city

ASAP Production is coming out with Four Short-Plays, directed by AmitSingh and produced by Siddhartha on 24th, 25th and 26th May, 2005 at the Alliance Francaise, Backyard, at 7.30pm. The Four Short-Plays have been adapted from four plays of Anton Chekhov. Tickets are priced atRs.75 and are available at Landmark (Nungambakkam and Spencer's Plaza)and Amethyst or call 9841117773 / 9840757702
Enjoy.

Oleanna

Caught the play Oleanna this weekend. A brief synopsis of the play as stated in the leaflet given to us as we stepped in-

"Oleanna is a story of the correctness and incorrectness of sexual and power politics; of gender war and intellectual vandalism in college campus; of academic power-play between a pedantic professor who wants to change the way of the educational system and a girl from 'the deprived class' who demands equal opportunity to education. When the girl-Carol- flunks her lessons and goes to the professor-John- for what appears to be a routine clarification session, the roller-coaster exorcism of the professor begins."

The play threw up some interesting ideas as we sat watching it. One of them was related to the main character of the play called John who is a professor and who wants to change the way education is imparted. He deals with a multitude of internal conflicts in trying to deal with his student Carol who has flunked her lessons and has come to him for help. John says in one of his many musings that

"Education is prolonged and systematic hazing"

It was his way of saying that such a system in which a person is not tested for what he knows but rather what he does not know is a farce. Listening to him Carol seems to get extremely distressed as she has, in her journey to graduate school, faced innumerable challenges and prejudices and here atlast when she had 'arrived', so to say, there was this professor who seemed to rubbish the entire concept and methodology of education. She lets out her anguish and frustration with a strong and forceful intensity.

This got me thinking that in my college days too, there were some of us who blamed the "system" and the fact that this methodology is all wrong and purposeless while there were others who had struggled to get to an engineering school and valued what they had and worked hard at it.However what I felt puzzled about was the fact that I who had complained about the whole "system" and its "machinations" was among the first to land a job when employers came on campus and the people who had valued the "system" and worked hard at it, found the going very difficult. It seemed to manifest the unfairness of the whole situation. I guess in the end, its just how things are and will remain.

Desperation...

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"

I heard these lines when I was watching the movie- "Shall We Dance?" Its a movie about a successful lawyer who has a beautiful wife, great kids and a happy family and yet finds himself wanting for something else. One day he sees a woman standing in the window of a dance school and he begins to look for her everyday. He joins the dance school and later in the movie tells the woman in the window that when he saw her standing there in the window, she looked on the outside what he was feeling on the inside.

Don't know why but I have been repeating these lines to myself for the last few days, its as if somebody gave words to what I have felt for a long time now. We have a nice family, great friends, a good job and people who love us and yet there is a need for something more, something that will thrill us every morning, something that will leave us exhilarated and yet when I try explaining this to my mom she thinks that I am unhappy with her which I am not. I guess these are some of those mysteries of life that one has to figure out for oneself.

In the end, the lawyer understands that if he had only shared what he felt with his wife and family, things would have been so much easier. Hmphh...

The Bible

Michael Muthu is back with his play
THE BIBLE;THE COMPLETE WORD OF GOD [ABRIDGED]
Written By: Adam Long, Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor
The Performers: Faheem Moosa, Hariharan and Rohit Bhatt
Directed by: Michael Muthu

See here for more details.

Basta*ds...

I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day. Some background info on her- she is a married woman and a mother. She got married to the man she loved and bore his children. This is probably why, what she said stunned me. She said that she was sick of the way she was living and that married life was so frustrating and to top it all, that "All men are Bastards". I can assure you that her husband is not a woman-beater or has ever been disloyal to her. As I goggled with surprise to hear what she said, I said,"Ahem!ahem!I believe you are talking to one(not a bastard, a man)" and she continued to ignore that aspect and carried on with her diatribe against all men.

As I sat and thought about the conversation we had, I realized a very strange coincidence. It was so simple a self-discovery that I chuckled and asked myself, why hadn't I thought of this before. It was that most women I have known, have called either all men or some particular man a bastard at some stage in their life. It was a strange statistic that cut across women of all cross-sections, caste, creed, economic strata yada yada yada. Of all the words in the English language that can be used an expletive, why do women use the word Bastard so often. Why question an individual's parentage just because your husband has not exactly been as loyal as you would want him to be or because somebody in the state transport bus just felt you up. It is akin to say that a person born out of a legal wedlock would not do the same thing. Actually by doing this, the blame is transferred from the person involved to his mother. It reminds me of a phrase in Hindi that goes like-
"Aurat hi aurat ki sabse badi dushman hoti hain"
which when translated means-
"A woman is a woman's worst enemy"

Imagine this, a man born out of a legal wedlock, feels up a woman and she calls him a bastard. Now she is not exactly abusing the person involved but is actually questioning the moral integrity of his mother. Now why do women around the world want to do that.

Strange, hmm...