Pensha

I had interviewed Alok Rajwade and Dharmakirti Sumant of Natak Company on their recent play, Binkamache Samwad. ---- All day long we are punching buttons furiously, forming words, sentences and posting, retweeting and forwarding them through several groups that we are members of. In the midst of all this, what happens to our poor brain and our ability to think and mouth original thought? What about the trash that’s generated through the meaningless conversation threads? This is the germ of Binkamache Samwad, a play by Natak Company. Directed by Alok Rajwade, the play falls in the genre of Theatre of the Absurd, a tragicomedy, that conveys the ‘nothingness’ of the moment that we are living in. Says Alok, “We are never confronted with simple, straight choices or situations. There are multiple layers and complexities that define our responses to any given situation. Our play tries to decode and analyse the decadence of language, why sending forwards without comprehending is a scary...

My interview with Tushar Pandey --- The Hindi adaptation of Evgeny Shvarts’ Russian play, The Dragon will be staged in the city on April 5. Directed by Tushar Pandey, the play holds a magnifying glass to the socio-political changes taking place in the society, says Ambika Shaligram. Banned by the Post-War Stalin government for its anti-authoritarian theme, Russian playwright Evgeny Shvarts’ biting satire is spun out of myth and lore. The central character is a big, bad dragon who has ruled a town for 400 years and now he has set his eyes on the town’s loveliest maidens, when enters the ‘knight in shining armour’. The ‘knight’ is a well-travelled young man who is on a mission to save the town and rescue the damsel from her tragic plight. But there’s just one problem. The townsfolk don’t want to be saved! Power Play Translated from English into Hindi by Harsh Khurana, the adaptation will be staged by the students of The Drama School, Mumbai, in association with Mumbai Marathi S...

My review of National Award winning movie, Court --- Newspaper headlines these days are all about alleged extremists getting caught/detained and incriminating material being seized from them. Most of us flip over the page and the said news is buried somewhere, until there is a brouhaha over the detention of the said terrorist. In most cases, even that dies down soon enough and the ‘accused’ is dropped from the public consciousness. Court is the story of one such person named Narayan Kamble. The scene opens to Kamble wrapping up tuition classes at his home, to reach a residential colony inhabited by a few lower middle class families, where he and his troupe would present a powada (ballad). As his song nears the end, the police arrive and take him away, for abatement of suicide of a sewage worker, Vasudeo Pawar. According to the charges slapped on Kamble, his song had incited Pawar to commit suicide. The seemingly ludicrous charges are actually a bigger design to detain the socia...

Ambika Shaligram chats up with Virat Husain, who is playing Empress Nur Jehan in Mehernama, and learns more about zenana politics and why the Empress was special. * Zenana can never distance itself from politics. There are too many instances in history where women have taken on more powerful roles in the running of their kingdom. So what made Nur Jehan special? The zenana has always been powerful in Indian history, because women in the royal family have always played a consultative role in the running of the empire. There have been instances where the women have run the kingdom in the absence of a male member of the ruling family. However, nowhere in Indian history has a queen ruled in the presence of an emperor. * As per the Mughal tradition, the seal of the empire was often kept in the harem so that the women could read the pronouncements of the emperor and put a seal on them before they became public. But Nur Jehan has been the only empress in ancient and medieval India, whose...