How theatre in Delhi has been finding and creating stages beyond Mandi House

A theatre is not a blank page for editorial, it is not a soapbox or a Tannoy system: it is a conscience that wakes with what is happening in the space, and wakes further still in response to what people are making of it.

-Andrew O'Hagan

When I joined the Hindi dramatic society of my college in Delhi University in 2003, it was the mention of the National School of Drama (NSD) that used to get us all starry eyed. To give us a flavour of the city's theatre, our seniors took us to Mandi House for a show of Premchand's Rangbhoomi. We sat enraptured as we watched professional actors play out the subtleties and complexities of each character, and of a bygone era. It still remains one of the most memorable performances I have witnessed.

Therefore it was only natural that when those interested in theatre walked out of their colleges, NSD was one of their top priorities. Of course with few seats and state-wise allocations, not everyone could join. Some people trained at other places in and outside India and brought to Delhi their experiences of physical theatre, theatre with dance, theatre as therapy, theatre with communities, children, theatre as clowns . . . As these specialisations developed, the theatre circuit in Mandi House expanded to make way for a larger, more organically shaping theatre scene in different parts of the city.

In Shadipur, Studio Safdar has a small rehearsal-performance space and also a book cafe, which hosts readings, talks, music sessions. Groups have been hosting intense performances in small cafes. There are "alternate theatre" groups like Third Space Collective that have been successfully staging their shows on bigger stages like Epicentre, Gurgaon. The group I was associated with, Aatish, and the project I was part of, Genderventions (by The Pocket Company, directed by Niranjani Iyer), transform atypical spaces like parks, gullies and bus stands for interactive theatre on ongoing social issues. And then there is solo theatre by people like Maya Rao and Mallika Taneja deeply invested in issues like gender justice, power packed deliveries that have broken the myth of such performances being navel-gazing exercises involving dull monologues. Mohalla Festivals organised by the Lost & Found Trust hosted performances in residential colonies, supported by the resident welfare associations and the inhabitants of the locality. Trees people jogged beneath in parks were used to prop halogens.

Almost all these groups are travelling troupes, performing outside Delhi and, at times, outside India too. Apart from NSD, there are theatre courses in Sri Ram Centre and in newly emerging institutions like Shiv Nadar University and Ambedkar University. Courses are being designed keeping in mind people in other professions so that they do not have to thwart their love for theatre because of being in full time jobs. At the same time, schools have opened up to teaching theatre and theatre practitioners are being appointed by them. Theatre Professionals, Mumbai, is a group that has been identifying such artists in Delhi and placing them with schools here. Kingdom of Dreams in Gurgaon is seen as many as an elitist, commercialised theatre space while other actors feel the pay they get there allows them to do other, more "soulful" theatre. Slam Out Loud, an arts group I worked with, is pushing the envelope further and taking theatre to children in government schools.

This varied mix of theatre groups, spaces and methods has been a welcome development in Delhi where theatre enthusiasts do not have to settle for a narrow definition of theatre but can choose to get involved in the kind of theatre that relates best to their individual interest and ideology.

First published in DailyO, 10 Nov 2018.

V for Vendetta: A film I do not tire of watching

As Guy Fawkes Night has been observed for Centuries because it is imbued with a timeless symbolism, so are certain films which become a part of you — and increasingly relevant — over time.

Like most films, V for Vendetta too is not able to perform highly enough to meet the expectations of its illustrious parent, the book with the same title by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The occasional attempts to insert mush do not go well with the overall flavour of the story.

Having disclaimed that, it is safe to say that the 2005 movie made by James McTeigue and written by The Wachowskis holds a claim to distinctiveness. It is special enough to make me and my partner watch it when we wish to compensate for being away from our families on festivals.

The film doesn’t fail expectations at all. It is a high tension electric wire running through the audience’s minds and hearts as the anarchist revolutionary V, played by Hugo Weaving, orchestrates a series of events to expose the government, very much in the vein of the Paris revolution’s “No replastering, the structure is rotten.” It is art done elegantly, when a dystopian theme like this could have resulted in a lot of confusion and muck flying around. Its finesse does not gesticulate towards its beauty but rests in its place after it has been created, to be appreciated by those who will.

I believe it settled in some part of me because after I saw it, one of my delirious dreams, conceived during some sickness, was this:

A feminist revolution has achieved the complete eradication of sexism. I know the overthrow has been successful because some of the revolution graffiti is also sent to my new phone as a text message. The first line reads: “It may seem to you an occasion of bereavement but you’ll soon discover that it is one of joy.” I read the message and am immediately reassured that the efforts made by me and my compatriots to bring in equality of all genders have not been in vain.

It awakens unstirred parts of you: vestigial parts that haven’t been used in a while so you can’t immediately locate the vibrations. So you don’t want to talk about the movie after it’s over but close your eyes and wrap yourself around you and listen to those stirrings and eventually act upon them, when you are hit hard by the truth of these words uttered by Valerie, a character V fondly recalls in the film: “Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.” I know I want to live each day, no matter what the span of my life, when Valerie’s voice in the film gives credence to her persona in the book: “ . . . for three years, I had roses, and apologized to noone.”

Without pouncing upon you with some cliched declamation, it touches you in places you had not thought of for some time. You see it as a long-forgotten friend but don’t know how your present world will absorb it and so you quietly pull it into a corner and keep it hidden, to visit when no one is around. You know that it is not vendetta that V needs; he needs love and out of that love for him you want him to have his vendetta for isn’t he wonderful and shouldn’t he have everything he desires?

And of course, most of all, the film is about the fearlessness everyone wants, fear being the only real obstacle to living. I had been hugely impressed with the part where Natalie Portman is angry with V for making her go through torture, until he makes her realise that it had been to rid her of her fears. There is solace in the routine of torture because you seem to know more or less when it will be, even if it is every day, and can actually prepare yourself for it, and then be tortured and have even more time to prepare for the next day. This is not in the nature of a calamity, which catches you unawares and demands immediate attention. Isn’t it true that the only way to defeat our fears are to go ahead and meet them, to look them in the eye, rather than to keep looking over our backs all life?

A lot of fans have tried to guess at who the character of V “really” is, to speculate on his relations with other characters. I do not want to do that, to indulge in the “paradox of asking a masked man who he is”. Because I think what the film, and V, wanted us to know and believe was that V is all of us, and that we have it in us to be V if we can go through a fire and come out burnt but not broken.

First published in  thREAD, The Hindu, 8 Nov 2018.

"Are you not entertained?" Or, the summer I became slave to television

"Are you not entertained?"Rang out the voice of Gladiator's Russel Crowe, mocking me on a drowsy summer afternoon as my dilated pupils momentarily focussed to see myself turning into a television debaucher. I first stood witness to the goggle-box’s sorcery, which has the power to change humans into zombies, when I was in Oman in the early 2000s. I had a month-long break from college, but my father’s teaching at his university was on so I tried to keep myself occupied when at home. In the living room sat a black box, and a remote control which deluded me into believing that I was running the show. 

My conscientious self first turned on the news. But it usually left me ragged as I tried to go through the national news and then wanting to know about the regional bits, then moving on to BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera, for tales from other spots on the globe. At moments when I was off guard and forgot to remind myself about the futility of regretting the past, I realised frustratingly how much I had missed knowing, learning. I cursed myself for not having paid enough attention in my school days when my grandfather had tried to drum into me the conscious-of-her-rights-and-duties citizen’s habit of newspaper-reading. Motivation had failed me after the first few days, as I got busy with staring deep into the soulful liquid eyes of Dickensian heroes ensconced within the biscotti pages of my novel.

My father’s cable network also came with Pakistani channels, which offered better and more realistic soaps than what we had on the domestic menu in India. I found that the class divide still existed for our neighbouring creative heads, unlike in most present-day Indian soaps, which create a lot of bubbles for its audience. And then, of course, were the movies. Fox, MBC 1, MBC 2, MBC 3, MBC 4, Dubai One, City 7. Besides the regular Star Movies-HBO stuff, they also featured content that was non-mainstream but surprisingly intriguing. Or maybe boredom made me inept at distinguishing the good from the bad, as long as I had a roomful of people speaking in a frame.

Perhaps the reader would be more sympathetic to my charmed state if they knew I did not have access to cable TV all of my school life, for my family’s (not entirely misplaced?) fear it would hamper my studies. So when my classmate made a humongous card of patchwork photos and sent it to MTV’s Most Wanted Shenaz, all I had to offer was a Mickey card my friend had been sweet enough to draw in order to compensate for the artistry I lacked. I sent it to Vishal Malhotra on Disney Hour, hosted by DD Metro, a channel which was Doordarshan’s half-hearted effort to add spice to the life of its viewers). But he never flaunted it as a sign of all the love the show had been getting from its tiny tot viewers.

Anyway, during that vacation, duly wired into adulthood and satellite, the other thing to have become quite a hit with me was CSI. Thank god for re-runs. One didn’t have to wait for a week for the follow-up. One could cover the whole CSI range in a day — ‘Miami’, ‘NY’, ‘LVPD’, the whole lot. I also bumped into Bones, whose existence I was sinfully unaware of until then. I never thought I was much for blood and gore but I admit I couldn't help a mean, satisfied smirk when I noticed the grimaces of my co-spectators, on the days I had some. No matter how fictitious the contents, it was the fascinating picture dictionary I never had: “And look Dad, it talks, too!”

Indoor evenings were spent watching Munnibai’s ghazal recitals, the mention of whose gharana still makes people touch their ears in reverence. As she voiced the pining lover's ostensibly self-effacing-but-actually-narcissistic taunt-laden entreaties, it was easy to see where the effusive wah-wahs of the audience came from. After reading Naguib Mahfouz and Abdel Rehman Munif, it was one more step towards furthering my conscientious, hangdog — mea culpa-enclosed-herewith — project of privileging the Orient.

I tried to delight in all of it, hoping I was going to grace my couch less often in the future unless I planned to practise total self-abhorrence. The me-tube alliance was welcome for some time but its best-before date ultimately arrived. I could sense in myself anxiety that had been building because of feeling divorced from reality, an apprehension that I would find myself unequipped if suddenly I were to face the world outside. What takes place in the virtual world occurs at a speed that far outpaces the happenings of our comparatively humdrum existence. In order to experience in about two hours and twenty minutes a host of happy endings and complex issues that take years to truly understand, it would have to be not just an out-of-the-telly-box experience but an out-of-body one. And, therefore, pulling the plug seems such an arduous task. The minute we stop gazing at others’ lives and turn to examine our own, the oranges we were viewing on screen get rapidly muted into rust and soon mutate into dull browns. It becomes that much tougher to tolerate the monotonous and (as it appears to us) slow progression of time as part of life, after having become accustomed to gazing at animated colours accompanied by spikes engineered to shoot up at short intervals (think canned laughter).

My dreams too had been taken over by telly characters. I soon realised that whether it is televised or not, my revolution will surely not be delivered by television. I then became keener on delving into the off-screen unedited version of ‘The World As You Know’. Bill Hicks was right: “Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.” And I wanted my third eye up and running, as slick and in-form as Shiva’s. One must be careful not to become a passive content consumer. The more we get ensconced in the treacle of TV, the hypnotic opiate of visual entertainment, the more tenuous our tether to the real world can get.

This goes for the Internet as well, where our senses are first jolted into feeling too much and then become comatose as we float from one news piece/picture/video to another, trying to take it all in. Doing it for long and continuous hours makes us feel smaller and smaller in the ever widening web of the world. It becomes the perfect trigger for existential angst: what is the significance of our life and work in this Goliath of a universe? We start wondering about what we could do to bolster our presence there, as we become less and less present in the real world and for real people, divorced from our most immediate communities.

Years later, having learned to watch TV with a timer on, I came across little boy Jack in Emma Donoghue’s book, Room, talking about how his mommy does not let him watch too much television because it had once turned her “into a zombie that’s like a ghost but walks thump thump”. I wanted to say to him, “Well, boy, just listen to your mother on this.”

First published in thREAD, The Hindu, 13 Apr 2018.