Sunday Snippets
By Venkatesh Raghavan
It was much before I landed a full time job as a journalist with the Free Press Journal at Nariman Point located in South Bombay (Mumbai was called Bombay then). After viewing the notice board at my alma mater, Xavier Institute of Communications, I decided to take part in a street play endeavour that was proposed by the XIC in house group, Astha.
The director of the play was a lady by name Jyotsna. We also had a narrative compering on the theme of our play by Sanjeev. It took us several rounds of rehearsals to get our act together. During the course of the rehearsals I learnt about how drama artists use a series of simple physical exercises to warm up before getting into the rehearsal act.
It was a great learning experience for me as I had till then been creating and directing plays for a college audience in a slapdash fashion. Besides unlike the college level plays which were in English, our social theme street play was in Hindi, meant to cater to audiences from all strata.
I recall our group’s performance at two venues with contrasting responses. Our play after several rehearsals and enhancements carried the message of anti communalism and anti dowry. In our series of street performances, we were scheduled to enact our play at the Juhu SNDT University campus. I was a bit tense as our group had to go through the acts in front of a massive female audience. Much to our relief, we all performed well and received an overwhelming round of applause from the young college audience.
I felt excited at the prospect of our street play turning out to be a run away hit with the folks. That’s when Jyotsna announced that we will be conducting our street play outside the residence of a family where a dowry death had occurred.
Sanjeev who was the senior most and also in charge of our narrative, encouraged us. saying there was no need to fear though we may be performing in front of a hostile audience. Just get into your acts and forget yourselves, was his advice.
The venue was at the central suburbs of Bhandup. We reached the venue, travelling by local train at around 3.30 pm. Our team got ready as Sanjeev launched into his narrative that announced the theme of our play.
Much to our relief our acts went off well like clockwork. We could sense the hostility of the locals who had rallied round the boy’s family. However, we held our nerves. At the end of it, while returning from the venue, I jokingly told Jyotsna, we had a Pakistani audience, unwilling to applaud a good performance.
For purpose of posterity, I quote a stanza from the song we had created
Aaj hum poochhein kuchh sawal
Tum se hum se sab se aaj
Kya sub se bada hai dharm,
Dharm hai to kis like
Translated it means, today we are asking a question to you and all of us, is religion bigger than everything. What’s the purpose of religion?
