What was it that was so dissatisfying about A Decade in Books, a presentation by Nilanjana Roy followed by a discussion with Anita Roy and Amit Varma? It was a sharp presentation – Ms. Roy went through each year in as much detail as possible, she mentioned plenty of interesting facts about the publishing industry and even offered short analyses and thought-out predictions. But at the end of it, I felt that the whole event had been more concerned with the state of publishing – and how to improve that – than with literature.

It was telling that almost all the books and writers she mentioned were mainstream – good or bad, ‘literary’ or ‘popular’, they were almost all published by the big corporate publishers. It was assumed that what constituted books/literature was what the mainstream publishers published and what the mainstream reviewers and critics commented on; the assumptions too were obviously mainstream – the books nominated for the Booker were considered literary in spite of the fact that for the last many years, the Booker has been giving its prize to entirely unremarkable, ‘realistic’, middlebrow books, many of which are aesthetically still stuck with Flaubert. Such as? Hilary Mantell, Aravind Adiga, Anne Enright, Kiran Desai, Ian McEwan. I think somebody even referred to the Booker as the “citadel of high literature”. Yes, the Booker considers itself that. Should we? (Click here to read the whole post)

The Kala Ghoda Art Festival 2010 kicked off to a rollicking start on Saturday. After sampling a bit of literature, visual art, music and food through the day, I finally settled on theatre for my final course in the night. The play ‘Dance Like A Man’ was being staged at Horniman Circle at 7.30 p.m.

I’ve attended music events at Horniman Circle before, most of them Kala Ghoda Art Festival events. It is an unconventional setting, a stage in the center of a park. But it works really well, more so for a play than a music concert given the intimate interaction that is possible between audience and performer.

A bench-painting event had been conducted earlier in the evening owing to which all the seating en route to the stage bore ‘Wet Paint’ signboards. It was too dark for photography and I was eager to get to the stage before the play started but I passed some interesting art on the way. (I hope one of us will be able to post photographs soon).

Just as well, I suppose, since we got there just about five minutes before the play began. All the seats were taken so we sat down on the grass and that’s how we watched the entire play. Normally, I would not consider squatting on the ground for a play but like I said, this was an unconventional setting.

The stage and seating area were edged on one side by ‘Lotuses of the Floating World’, an art installation by Sabrina Mascarehas. As I approached the area, I first thought they were diyas floating in a pool. But I soon realized that there is no water body inside the park and the temperature was the uncharacteristic cool of February rather than the heat of a hundred lamps. (Click here to read the whole post)

Confession: I am not a foodie. I have never been interested in trying out new restaurants, nor in making an effort to check out the food typical of places I’ve travelled to. So for me, it was an hour of wonder, listening to a panel discussion on food writing. I will freely also confess, what drew me was that two of the panelists (Nilanjana Roy and Shoba Narayan) have been on panels over the last few weeks discussing my recent book, Roadrunner, with me. (Shoba in Bangalore, Nilanjana in Delhi). And in November, this session’s moderator, Vikram Doctor, moderated me in another discussion. He’s invariably knowledgeable and engaging, which only made this panel more appealing still.

(Click here to read the whole post)

I’m standing outside one of the KGAF bookstores, idly browsing through random coffee-table books including several as tall as my daughter with spectacular photographs. Rs 1271 for those, which is about Rs 1270 more than I’m carrying, so I resist the urge successfully.

But then the wife who forms a major part of the couple to my right giggles and tells her husband: “Supercars, masterpieces of design and engineering!” This strikes me as an odd thing to say to your husband on a random Sunday afternoon, until I catch sight of a book under my nose with that very title. Has a very sporty looking grey Mercedes on the cover.

He picks up the book, flips through it and puts it back, saying “Na, na!”

Then she reaches over and, with a huge grin, hands him a book on the cover of which a muscular lifeguard carries an apparently unconscious woman in a sleek swimsuit cut impossibly high on the thigh. “Baywatch!” she says (the wife, not the woman in the swimsuit), because that’s the title of the book.

He doesn’t even flip through it. He says “Na, na!” and puts it back.

The man’s turned down a book on flashy cars and a book likely filled with women in swimsuits? What am I, standing next to the Mr Geek Universe titleholder himself? Maybe he invested his hard-earned rupees in the book that lies between those other two, by name “The Complete Office Handbook”?

But then to my left, a young woman drags a reluctant young man in bermudas and a baseball cap to the book display. Across her chest, in glitter, is “bebe”. Across his chest, in white, is the edifying message “I don’t mind coming to work, it’s the 8 hour wait to go home that’s a bitch”. She reaches out and hands him a three-book set wrapped in plastic. It has the fascinating title “Discover Creative Solutions to Everyday Challenges.” She mutters something at him about how he should buy it and read it.

He looks at it and nearly flings it back on the pile. “No, no”, he says.

What is this, Get Hubby To Buy Useless Books Day at KGAF ‘09?

***

To much nodding and bopping in the audience, a very noisy band plays rock. “Ru-Ba-Ru” is one of the songs, and the singer manages to lean over a partition and stick the mike into a passing lady’s face, whereupon she croons into it but we don’t hear her voice and he shrugs. Next they play one of their own compositions, called “Bas Karo“. I bump into a friend in the crowd as they are playing, and he yells in my ear “Really awful band, no?”

I wouldn’t have said that, but they are indeed noisy. Next on stage is a band called The Other People. Now I heard these other guys a couple of years ago somewhere, and then they played one of my favourites, “Mony Mony”. At the end, the singer announced that this was a Billy Idol song. This is the kind of factoid that makes music-obsessed old geezers such as myself splutter through our dentures, because “Mony Mony” was originally composed and sung by Tommy James and the Shondells in the late 1960s, and covered by Idol in the ’80s.

So after that show, I went up to the guy as he wandered through the crowd and said to him through my dentures, “Good show, but Mony Mony isn’t by Billy Idol, dammit!”

And I’ve run into the guy a few times since, like today after their gig, and he always breaks into a big grin and points to me and says, “I know you!” (It’s the dentures, they give me away).

Today, they sing “Twist and Shout”, “La Bamba” and “Walk of Life”, among others. So when I run into him later, and he says “I know you!”, I say, “Hey, I enjoyed it, but too bad you didn’t sing Mony Mony! I was waiting for it. But I liked that Billy Joel tune.”

That one was “You May Be Right.” I jumped and clapped so much my arthritis started acting up.

Okay fine, the above title may not be entirely true but adding a little credit to it – Something Relevant, the Jam Band that performed at Kala Ghoda Arts festival yesterday afternoon, mainly consists of some fine Parsi Dikaras.

Needless to say, these guys (Parsis + Non Parsis) completely rocked da house. And such was their impact that even my mum (a non-videshi music listener) sat thru most of their play time without any complaints.

In all honesty, I am not very fond of Jazz/Rock genre but give me Pop or R&B anytime and I am game. However this experience, I will admit made me realize how rigid in my music taste I had been all along.

(Click here to read the whole post)

Two of the gems of experimental cinema - Manhatta and The Man With The Movie-Camera - were screened at the Gallery Beyond yesterday. Since I missed the first one (I watched it on the internet anyway), I shall review only The Man With The Movie-Camera.

Made in 1929 by Dziga Vertov with cinematography by his brother Mikhail Khaufman, The Man With The Movie-Camera captures the Russian life in all its avatars. The movie has no story as such, yet one could call it the story of a people and a time.

The movie shows the Russian way of life in minute detail, and not often in the sad way that directors of art movies are wont to perceive. The camera captures in a most natural way the beautifully uncertain smiles, the lips that make unheard whispers, basking ladies, the victories and the excitement, the routine and the indifference - all captured with the devouring eye of a greedy voyeur and the detailed panache of a keen observer. The result is a movie which speaks of life without judgment and the consequent pitfalls that a jaundiced eye brings to the task of film-making. (Click here to read the whole post)

After Kiran Nagarkar, Saeed Mirza. Mirza’s new book, Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother, is out from Tranquebar Press. On Monday night, an hour after her conversation with Nagarkar, Nilanjana Roy sat on stage with Mirza to talk about Ammi. And Rahul Bose read several passages from the book.

Nilanjana said that when the manuscript came to her (as Tranquebar’s editor), she figured it would take her a week to read it. Instead, she sat up one night and finished it, and knew right away that she had to make it Tranquebar’s first book.

That was introduction enough.

Mirza began by telling us that his mother came from a “tradition of inclusion”, and had a “largeness of spirit.” These were values, he said, that are disappearing today, leaving only a chauvinism and a lack of the generosity he knew in his mother. Rahul Bose echoed that theme. He said of the book that it speaks of a world we all know; it is a lament for this country, a mixture of longing, love, unslaked thirst and a sense of loss. Books like these, people like Mirza, he said, are the “bits of chewing gum” that keep us together.

(Click here to read the whole post)

The third session of Experimental Cinema screenings (and my second), Gallery Beyond showcased the last four of Avant-Garde movies they had chosen to screen. I say chosen to screen because the Avant-Garde Collection (from which the movies are being shown) is a much wider collection comprising many more movies than time would have allowed them to show.

The four movies screened were:

• Regen (Rain) (Netherlands, 1929) directed by Joris Ivens, 14 minutes: This is a movie every Bombayite would love to watch, especially if you’ve grown up watching the rain and what gentle poetry it can create on the streets and in the minds of men. If you can catch this short film anytime, please do so. It is a lovely evocation of rain in Amsterdam and how people react to it. Perhaps the most lyrical of all Avant-Garde movies, it is for the best that it is a silent movie. The gentle strumming of the guitar throughout the movie is the only sound the movie has. It is the director’s best documentary before he moved on to doing political documentaries. It is now my favorite documentary; when you have watched it, it will be yours too.
• H2O (US, 1929) directed by Ralph Steiner, 12 minutes: This movie demonstrates what light can do with surfaces, especially with water. An intensive exploration of the play between light and water, it soon delves into abstractions leaving the consciousness of the existence of water behind. Recommended only if you love the sort of cinema that academics can argue and debate over.

(Click here to read the whole post)

(Apologies for the technological incompetence that resulted in this being empty when I first put it up).

I’ve never read Kiran Nagarkar, but after Monday evening when he spent an hour in conversation with Nilanjana Roy, I resolved to fix that lacuna in my life. Not so much because of the samples of his writing we heard or heard described, but because of the man. If that makes sense.

For one thing, his sense of humour. It was there in the first bit of reading he did. This wasn’t a passage from any of his books, but three short fictional biographical blurbs about himself that he wrote for what he said was a short-lived website he had once. “Take your pick”, he said of the three, and it was hard. In one, he claimed to be the most prolific writer in history, having written works now claimed by such luminaries as Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Shobhaa De and the various apostles who put together that book known as the Bible. In another, he claimed to be the inspiration behind the crimes of Idi Amin, Osama, Mugabe and others. It wasn’t just that these outlandish claims were funny by themselves; it was the way he made them, and the way he read them out to us, that had the audience chuckling.

And it was apparent in the rest of his conversation too. Something about the way this man spoke with and to his audience hinted at an alert, vibrant mind, always a good substrate for humour, and so always on the lookout for humour. Not the laugh-out-loud slap-you-on-the-back humour of a Bollywood-style Johnny Lever, yes, but a subtle, self-deprecating kind that grows and builds with that twinkle in his eye. It brought to mind Davy Barry, or Groucho Marx, or perhaps someone even subtler, like Art Buchwald or PL Deshpande.

But there were other things about Nagarkar. (Click here to read the whole post)

I was lazing around in the afternoon and almost on a whim, I decided to attend the Avant-Garde movie screenings held at the Gallery Beyond. And it was so good that at the end of it, I cursed myself for being lazy and not attending on previous days.

The map for the festival does not pinpoint the location of the Gallery. And nobody except the a man standing outside Max Mueller could tell me where Gallery was. As a result, I arrived at the Gallery a full one hour late. To add to my woes, the watchman there told me that games were being played at the Gallery (Yahaan toh khel khila rahein hain).

Just as I was about to leave thinking that the event had been shifted to some other venue at the last minute for which notifications could not be put up on the website, a man told me that movies were indeed being screened at the Gallery and directed me to a door. I entered a darkened hall where the movies were being screened. It was only when my eyes adjusted to the light and I spotted paintings hanging on the walls around me that I realized I’d been ushered into the gallery itself.
(Click here to read the whole post)

At every moment in our lives, perhaps, we are to some extent actors, or performers, as well as spectators. When performers and spectators “connect” it creates a very special quality of theater that both transports and transforms all those involved. In India we cherish this strong link between reality and fantasy first through theatre and now through film. All this age old mimicry of life somehow affects us and in return this mimicry is in itself a self-definition of the society we live in. This is what I love about the medium that through a little imagination and snap of a finger we are somewhere else. Taking it a step further many forms of classical dance in India imbibes the same values of theatre mixing them till we get operaish dance put to music.

Yakshagana is one such dance opera I got the opportunity to see at KalaGhoda yesterday. The dance is usually described as folk but this theatre form from Karnataka, the Yakshagana or the song of the celestials has strong classical undertones. Hardly surprising because the dance was born from the Bhakti movement and was designed to bring classical dance beyond its then traditional elitist audience. As the dance unfolded at the Rampant row amphitheatre it raptured the much of the onlookers with its singing and drumming blended with dancing and the quaint endearing kannada dialogues from players, clad in striking costumes in myriad hues and sizes, provided for a very pleasant afternoon.

I was still curious and wanted to learn more may be exchange a conversation with the artists so I some how evaded the Kala Ghoda event staff and went back stage. This is what I saw - A corner clothesline overflows with hair switches, tassels, garlands and `jewels.’ The dim walls are agleam with bright headgear, chest and shoulder armour and the shelves packed with ornaments and anklets. The table is a mass of crushed and ironed costumes. There sat Rakshasha, or a man dressed as one, in front of pictures of an entire pantheon of gods praying; an antithesis if I ever saw one. Very soon I found myself sharing a chai with large men with painted faces and even larger pagades, (a type of head gear) talking about cricket before their next act began.

If there’s one thing that I don’t like about the Kala Ghoda festival, it’s that it makes me wish I could be at three different places at the same time. For the last two days I’ve been running from one program to another, usually arriving sometime mid-way between the second show which usually leaves me desperately craning my neck and standing on my toes so that I can see over the heads of the crowds. It usually doesn’t help.

(Note to self: Grow taller)

But really, I found myself wishing that there could be some way to stop the tallest people from standing right in front of the stage and leaving all the poor vertically challenged souls (like me) with only a partial view of the stage, and cursing their VC genes. Wouldn’t it be great if seating were determined by height? So if you were over six feet tall and wearing headgear which added another foot to your height, you would sit in the back row and yet, have the perfect view of the stage because only shorter people would be allowed to sit in front of you. See? That way everybody’s happy!

Coming back to the performances.

I reached the amphitheatre about mid-way through the Odissi recital by Jhelum Paranjpe and her troupe, and until it struck me that I could actually climb up the steps of the amphitheatre, I watched about five minutes of six pieces of elaborate headgear bob up, down and sideways all together.

When wisdom and a better view dawned, I came to the conclusion that Odissi is such a pretty dance form - all feminity and coy smiles and sweetness and light. Which might probably explain why the sight of the two male dancers in that group of women, disturbed me on a very fundamental level. Oh they were good – performing all the abhinaya and the mudras and the curvaceous movements with practiced ease - no doubt about it, but it was just a *little* disconcerting to see them dance the exact same steps as all the female dancers and with the same amount of…feminity?

The Dasavatar (ten incarnations of Vishnu) piece that they - the three male dancers - performed towards the end dispelled all my ignorant notions of how Odissi was a purely feminine dance form. Those men displayed energy, and effervesence and grace and there was nothing feminine about it. They were marvelous as they went from Matsya through to Varaha, playful as Krishna, serene as Buddha and downright frightening as Narasimha.

Jhelum then performed a solo on a hymn by Salbeg - a Muslim poet who worshipped a Hindu god – and it was beautifully done. Jhelum was graceful and wonderfully emotive as she acted out the pain of the poet, who was not allowed to worship at the temple because he was a Muslim, and how he longed for his lord to grant him deliverance from his crippled earthly body.

The last performance was a pure dance piece titled Moksha, in which all the dancers performed. It was an awesome sight to see as ten pairs of ghungroo-laden feet danced, ten wrists delicately bent and ten heads gracefully swayed along with the music in perfect unison.

So much prettiness!

I think I shall now have a perfectly legitimate grudge against my parents for a) never sending me to any dance classes and b) passing on the vertically-challenged gene to the sole family member who could’ve done without it.

Day 4: Smorgasword has been discussed already, and in delectable detail. This is just an unnecessarily verbose attempt to look at the evening again.

Enough has been said by now about the mosquitoes at the DSL Garden, those gargantuan monstrosities of nature. Naturally, we (the DSL cat and I) must skip their exploits and roll down our sleeves (for such is a must in these parts), and jump right ahead to an early evening with four celebrated practitioners of words on stage and celluloid.

Rafeeq Ellias, moderator for the session, jumpstarts the discussion with a brief introduction about his career as film maker (his award winning documentary The Legend of Fat Mama receives no humble mention) and photographer, and confesses to having coerced consumers to buy products they didn’t need in his capacity as an adman.

Rahul DaCunha of the Rage Group requires no introduction to the theatre-savvy audience. He dwells, instead, on the method of writing for stage and screen. Drawing upon his vast experience as the director of a leading advertising agency, he assures the audience that the viewer of today has neither time nor patience for rambling storytelling and must be fed concise and concentrated messages that can be consumed with ease. The one-liner theory he espouses is common, yet a long running tradition in our film industry. You must be able to sum the story up in one line, he says, for it to be effective. Then he goes on to display a few Amul hoarding advertisements (for impression, we suppose). Of course, the lengthy display read aloud in a disinterested monotone dilutes the point somewhat.

Mahesh Dattani, renowned film maker and playwright, offers the first incisive idea of the evening. As opposed to the organic process of storytelling in the written medium, he sees writing for performance as a craft that must build within the temporal structure of time and space that the words will finally occupy on screen or stage. It is like painting a canvas without colours, his confused analogy stresses. The soft-spoken powerhouse of thought also ventures into the popular theme of the pains of writing and the irrational impulse that drives a writer on, every word lapped up by the numerous amateur writer martyrs in the audience. Oh, how we love to celebrate the mysterious pain that none but a fellow writer can ever understand.

Documentary film maker Madhushree Dutta (of Seven Islands and a Metro fame) builds on the need to structure a film in time/space and talks about the difficulty of juxtaposing the page as text (or even pre-text, as she explains with an excerpt from her documentary, Scribbles on Akka) with image and sound.

Then, quite suddenly, what was expected to be a free-wheeling discussion turns into a Q&A session with the audience. This has its pluses, of course. An interaction with the guests is most looked forward to in an event such as this. Questions flow free, about how the writing process differs for a performer, how the documentary narrative can be structured. The answers are forthcoming and insightful, giving glimpses into the mind of the writer as artist and craftsman.

Then, because the discussion has not been given a general direction, the line of questioning meanders. Somewhere between discussing tentative future theatre performance dates and lambasting Michael Moore’s popular documentaries for pandering to popular tastes and stories, the ‘word’ in ‘Smorgasword’ is lost. Not that the thoughts put forward here are interesting, thought out or justifiable either. Popular culture and narratives packaged for commercial viability is quoted as the reason for ’successful’ documentaries. The ‘toilet habits of Shahrukh Khan’, it is said, would be a popular documentary while those expressing more relevant stories would remain unseen. This seems more like a bitter backlash than a logical argument, especially in the wake of largely popular documentaries like March of the Penguins, or even Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. How the unassuming penguins or an unknown eccentric conservationist could ever compare to King Khan on the crapper is beyond us.

The bitterness continues with laconic nonchalance about the limited availability of and exposure to good theatre and documentaries. A few words of optimism and hope for our times (from Rafeeq Ellias and Mahesh Dattani) aside, it is widely agreed that the onus is on the people. It is the people who must encourage this culture, propagate and popularise it. We agree, but not entirely. Much sub-standard fare is being hawked around these days in the name of national and cultural pride that could be thoroughly avoided. In this heavily mediated world, it is rare that good theatre or documentaries go unnoticed. If an attempt at telling a story is not successful, let’s stop blaming the system of production, distribution and learned culture, and take a good look at where we are failing.

The session ends with an attempt to salvage the ‘word’ in ‘Smorgasword’. A question leads back to the idea of a story originating with a one-liner and of writing within the temporal structure, compared to the continuous inspiration process of organic growth in the written medium (as with poetry, for example). Must cinema or theatre be boxed within this paint-by-numbers structure instead of reaching for something larger as literature, the ‘higher art’, does?

The answers point to popular perception of ‘high art’ as an unreliable standard, since even Shakespeare was considered a writer of crass mass theatre in his time, replete with innuendos and farces. According to Mahesh Dattani, art is created in time and involves the supreme possibility that 100 years from now, even Subhash Ghai might be known as a profound artist. Madhushree Dutta also adds that cinema, being an audiovisual medium, is more available to the senses and thus perceived as an easily consumed or lower art form. All sensible arguments, these, but we do wish for a little open mindedness and a more erudite approach to the question. Must we disregard David Lynch, who scripted Inland Empire while shooting, writing scenes for each day on the previous night of the shoot? Did the European surrealists not exhibit the possibilities of cinema as an art form? The Japanese New Wave, Korean cinema today, have they not broken cinematic conventions of narrative with such success? Why do we, then, struggle to colour within the lines? Is it because we believe this to be a tried-tested formula for success? Are all stories within the formula a success? Certainly not. What is success anyway? And is that the basis for the entire discussion? Or is it simply because the guests enjoy a collective background in advertising that they think in this vein?

It turned out to be a fun evening after all. However, several fundamental questions have not been explored. Without them, the entire discussion flits on a forgettable periphery and turns into no more than a form of star gazing and celebrity chat-ups. The most fundamental of all, it seems, the guests do not ask of themselves every day, as anybody in the strange profession of creation should – why do we create? The answer might put everything else that has been discussed in perspective.

“We were given the choice of performing at the amphitheatre as well, but we wanted to recreate the atmosphere of the royal court of Wajid Ali Shah, which is where these two art forms – Thumri and Kathak – came into being.”

It is rare to find an artist who can not only convey her love and mastery of her art to the audience, but also make them fall in love with it. It is rarer to find two such artists and even rarer to find them amicably sharing a stage.

But that is what we witnessed at the Kathak–Thumri Milap at the NGMA auditorium today evening. Almost two full hours of enthralling music and scintillating dance. Dhanashree Pandit reminded me so much of those too rare teachers and professors, who made their classes so interesting that you’d actually bunk bunking to attend them. She didn’t just sing those thumris, she owned them – playing them out slowly at first, like kite-string, pulling, releasing, teasing and then… setting them free to fly.

And really, it was an education. For someone whose only talent (as far as Hindustani classical music goes) is being able to differentiate a Des from a Bhairav, I came away from that performance feeling like I had taans and aalaaps sloshing out of my ears (in the nicest way possible). I came away wanting to dedicate my life (or what is left of it) to music! And dance! And glory to the performing arts!

But coming back to real life.

Dhanashree began the show with an introduction to the basic thumri. She explained the birth of the thumri as a counter-development to the more complex and sophisticated khayals of the period. How folk songs from UP made their way into the Mughal courts, where they were cleaned-up, polished, decorated with Urdu words and finally presented as graceful thumris.

Thumri and kathak are apparently sister art-forms, both having originated under the patronage of Wajid Ali Shah. The word thumri itself, has its origins in dance - ‘thum’ being a bol used in kathak and ‘ri’ from the Hindi word rijhana (to please).

The pieces were presented as interactions between the dancer and the musicians - Dhanashree would sing a piece with Keka performing it simultaneously. Watching this interaction on stage was truly awe-inspiring because it seemed that they never needed to speak to each other, like they had this secret language between them which made words absolutely unnecessary. Keka would simply nod at the tabla-player and in the next second the auditorium would resonate with frantic-but-perfectly-in-sync activity from all the four people on that stage.

Keka Sinha was fascinating as she swayed, pirouetted and acted out the thumri themes one after the other. Whether they were the Radha-Krishna stories or the depiction of the eight nayikas*, she was marvelously convincing in all of them.

At the end of this wonderful, wonderful evening, all I can say is thank God for Wajid Ali Shah!

*Classical heroines of the ancient scriptures of dance.

Retrieved via the Wayback Machine. Originally posted by Yazad Jal

Theatre for me is more than the acting, lights, sounds, sets and props. It needs to have a little bit of magic. Large West End musicals sometimes have that magic. Cats had it. And sometimes folk theatre performed in the back garden of an old library has it.

Four short stories on cricket, ghosts, antique shops and jalebis. Poignant and playful the stories were told in a simple manner. All the actors were on stage all the time. Those not playing a part sat quietly in the background, merging with the set. The props used were basic, but managed to transform the actor into the character. An obviously false beard, but it made the masterji look authentic. Just a dupatta covering the head for a conservative housewife. And a ribbon in the plait for a little sweet schoolgirl. The acting was so real that I was there in the school, out in the street eating jalebis, and driving down Chandni Chowk to an antique shop.

I later spoke to two of the players, the husband wife team of Digvijay Savant and Shivani Vakil. There stories were first adapted by Ramu Ramanathan from Yuva Katha and first performed on 9/11! They’ve been adapted especially so that they could be performed anywhere - in school libraries, laboratories, even corridors! The sets and props are there to give a flavour of the lok-natya or folk theatre and appeal to a wide spectrum from South Bombay snobs to suburban security guards! Shivani adapted the jalebi script for her students at Walsingham School, and Digvijay has worked with street children from Aasra in Thane.

Short Stories from Around the Country. Performances by Shivani Vakil, Digvijay Savant, Anupama Jayaram, Jasvinder Singh & Dilshad Eidbam at the David Sassoon Garden on February 8 at 7.30pm