Thursday, October 23, 2008

Chhau!!!

I am going to feel every single cell separately in my body tomorrow morning, I know it and I am dreading it; but it will have been worth it.

There was a Chhau workshop in the city today; actually has been for the past two days, but thanks to The Hindu’s unconscionably tardy reportage I only knew about it today.

Now, I have only seen Chhau being performed live once. This was at the glorious festival of dance organised by the Sangeet Natak Academy on the theme of Sankhya - numbers zero to ten. Eleven dance choreographies in all, each interpreting a number. Wonderful stuff - some of it downright sublime. The Chhau performance was based on the number three. They used the concept of Trimurti as a platform to explore the number.

Chhau is an extraordinary dance form. It has been awarded status of a classical dance form in India but a lot of it I find is very modern in spirit; in dance terms I perhaps mean ‘contemporary’. What I am trying to say is that in Chhau a lot of the time the body does not ‘represent’, the body ‘becomes’. As against the symbolist and stylised approach of most other classical dance forms, Chhau attempts a sort of fragmented Modernist realism.

This attempt then, at becoming various things, is very demanding on the body. It is superb watch if done with control and involvement, but as I learnt today difficult, bloody difficult.

The workshop was conducted by Chhau exponent Pandit Gopal Dubey. Of course there is only so much you can learn in a day and we were only there to get a taste of what it must be like. But even that was hard on my normally unexerted poor body. Besides, everybody apart from me was a trained dancer, some in more forms than one. There were five others in all and three of them were dance gurus.

There was this one sequence which we learnt as an example - the representation of a wounded deer. The deer has an arrow right through it and it is writhing in pain and fear. The body is contorted in several ways while moving in a large elliptical locus while a hand each is to hold the entry and exit wounds. It was arduous. It was fantastic. I was thinking in my mind while I was doing it-

Koi mere dil se pooche teri teer-e-neemkash ko

Ye khalish kahan se hoti jo jigar ke paar hota

I am somewhat high with exhilaration as you must see, otherwise I wouldn’t be unwisely exerting my very sore shoulders any more tonight to write what I know is a jumble of unconnected facts and exclamations, but what the hell!


Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Into that heaven of freedom...

I write this in a state of mild embarrassment. I thought I was past this sort of thing. I have worked in the circumference of the Indian government and certain of its do-gooding tentacles for about a decade now. I know enough to know that very little good ever gets done. I have met scores of government officials who probably don’t even realise that they are corrupt because they know of no other way to be. I know that incompetence and apathy can be so bone-deep that it can seem to structure the system. I have been at more meetings than I care to remember where everybody knows what to say and everybody knows what will finally be done, knowing that the two are never the same thing. I have passed over stages of shock, disgust, rejection, defiance, and to detachment. I can usually work in this dystopic world determinedly doing what I have to, healing disappointment with amusement, fighting revulsion with rectitude and glossing pain with philosophy.

Not today it seems. Maybe I went in less cynical than usual. Maybe it was the five-feet tall tattered portrait of MK Gandhi I started at throughout the meeting. Maybe it was because they did not even get why I was refusing. Maybe it was because the auto back home had a faulty meter.

But I came home and bawled like a baby.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


That was yesterday. One good thing seems to have come out of it though. The matla of this ghazal which has been evading me for a month finally eased into me. So here-


Tabiat-e-imaan-o-taa’at fizool ho chala jaise

Muazzin -e- deen-e-bazaar ab rasool ho chala jaise


Koi na guzraa zakhm taazaa kiye bagair

Tohfaa-e-khaar ka kuch usool ho chala jaise


Duaa na sahi salaam qubool kar jao

Keemat-e-taaluq vasool ho chala jaise


Koi larzaa tho chale koi lahar aud le mujhko

Koi nishaan duaa qubool ho chala jaise


Hairaan hun aaj zharf kaise lafz-e-bayaan

Khamaa bhi dil ka tool ho chala jaise


Usko kyaa dhoonde jo chup ke baitha Zoya

Apne khaaliqi mein kuch bhool ho chala jaise




Sunday, October 19, 2008

My name is Rose

This got written a couple of months ago since I saw that a solitary sher was lolling around. Also, note new takhallus. The old one was phonetically tricky apart from meaning gollyrot. But think I’ll use them interchangeably, after the best tradition, what?

And while I was at it, my tiny tribute to the master in the matla.

________________________________________________________



Ghar na raha bana rashq-e-iram ab ke

Hai khabar unke aane ki garam ab ke


Gaye sarme jo odhaa behisii ka chadar

Ek barabar humse eid-o-muhharam ab ke


Dast-e-naseeb dast-e-dua kyonkar ho

Zabt-e-waqt mein bahe abd-e-dharam ab ke


Gile pe gila kareinge na keechad ko roenge hum

Bade minnato se barsa hai abre karam abke


Kuch naa-saaz se rehathe hai zehan-o-dil in dino

Adoo se kaho karein waar-e-naram ab ke


Kambakt hi sahi zoya kuch us kee bhi hasti hai

Waqt ne has-has ke toda ye bhi bharam ab ke



Wednesday, October 15, 2008

The Suit

This play by the Chandigarh-based company - The Company was what saved the Hyderabad Hindu Metroplus theatre festival 2008 from being a complete dud.

The play dramatised by Surjit Patar and directed by Neelam Mansingh Chowdhary is based on a short story by the South African Can Themba. It is easy to see what attracted Neelam Mansingh Chowdhary to it; it is a powerful story. A young couple’s extremely loving marriage begins to disintegrate into a sadomasochistic struggle of guilt and blame. The husband (Bunty) comes home one day to find his wife (Minna) in bed with her lover. Even as he struggles to deal with the shock he sees the lover’s discarded suit. He decides to use the suit as a weapon of revenge. He compels his contrite guilt-ridden wife to treat the suit as an honoured guest. No explanation is sought or given by either of them. From then begins a stressful grappling at normalcy underlined by the ever-present fear of blame and punishment for the wife and memory of betrayal for the husband.

The suit, in Bunty’s words, becomes the third presence; ubiquitously rearing its head in the most intimate of moments. Minna begins to crumble under the stress of not knowing when next it may destroy her peace.

Mansingh’s treatment of the material is imaginative as it is raw in a way that is pure Punjab. The play itself is in both Punjabi and English. Poetic Punjabi is always a strongly sensuous experience; it was particularly so in this play. There is a scene (highly stylised) played out in verse, in which Minna is applying for membership at the local social club. She has just sought Bunty’s blessing and now wants his help to fill the form. Minna begins to read out the usual biographical queries of the form which Bunty turns on their head to general and specific accusations and philosophic questions. It was of the stuff Punjabi was designed to do. Exquisite.

This production’s finest accomplishment is perhaps the bubble of intimacy it manages to create around the protagonists. It is a bubble that excludes all other- the extended world, society, the erstwhile lover, the audience. This bubble breaks and reforms in an increasing taut tempo leading up to a meltdown where Minna adopts her guilt by donning the suit herself and calling it her skin. Whether it is an act of defiance or surrender, it empowers her and wrests the initiative from the oppressor.

Vajendar Bharadwaj who plays Bunty is a wonderfully supple actor. He moves from joyously happy to wretched to ominous seamlessly. Mansingh has chosen to use elaborately stylised movement and choreographed elements in her rendering of Bunty. It helped enormously perhaps that Bharadwaj is such a beautiful man with extraordinary grace and a remarkable lack of stage-gaucheness.

Ramanjit Kaur as Minna was competent and seasoned but far more effective in her Punjabi lines that the English ones. It is perhaps difficult for female actors not to tug at their clothing if constantly required to dress and undress onstage, but one wishes she had desisted.

It is galling to nitpick at things that give you pleasure but unfortunately it is annoyingly easy.

It is a common ploy with long-running plays to try to create a certain immediacy and locality by using contextual elements of time and place. These methods are usually adopted to build a connection with the audience and set the play as close to them as possible. With this play such devices were not only unnecessary but highly unsuited. This play was about two people caught in their own very intimate, bizarre tradedy. It is not made more intense by bringing it closer to the audience, only less so. So then, when Bunty reads out from that morning’s Deccan Chronicle or talks of walking along Banjara Hills it may induce a few local smiles but at the cost of breaking a spell. In the penultimate scene where the couple are throwing a party and the two protagonists had managed to construct a superb atmosphere of brittle bonhomie with their beautifully - orchestrated air-talking, Bunty’s walking down the stage to the press section and offering an apple to a journalist in the audience came in the manner of swatting the fly on the wall.

Also, in a play which is powerful because so little is explained (Minna’s taking a lover, Bunty’s whimsical character) it seemed like a lukewarm cop-out to try and explain Minna’s submission in terms of a social dilemma instead of an emotional compulsion. She talks of not being able to leave and return to her parents which only worked to dilute the tension that had been so lovingly built up. It softened the texture of attrition which emerges during negotiations of power within physical and emotional spaces.

However, like Neelam Mansingh Chowdhary indicated during the post-play discussions, such plays are works in progress. The very fact that so much is unstated leaves you with fascinating possibilities. It is the kind of play I would want to see again after its hundredth show. It is bound to have evolved and it would be exciting to chart its growth.




Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Nukraee ghantiyaan si...

Been tagged by Ozman.

My oldest memory:

Being very very angry. It was a winter night in Delhi. My mother who was carrying me in her arms hit her head when somebody opened the window just as she got up from a chair. It was good thing perhaps that I did not have too many words on me those days.

10 years ago:

I was in Delhi with my life altering all around me.



My first thought today morning:

“Shit. I did not turn off that weekly prayer thingie”. See, for some reason the alarm clock in my phone does not work. I discovered instead something termed the ‘mobile prayer’. I found that a programmed prayer works just as well as a ordinary alarm tune. So my god of choice is Hanuman and the last time I needed it was apparently last Friday at 6. am.* My father who is always up at unearthly hours was, I think, a little intrigued.

.

You built a time capsule today what would it contain?

I thought about this one for a bit. A little induced panic and I was coming along just fine. My initial list included tiger DNA too. But see, ultimately (why baulk at words - deep down) I seem have a boringly Indian mentality when it comes to recording history. I don’t really believe that we ought to try.

But if I had to sneak past these principals and be tempted to freeze-preserve something, it would be the one thing that I am no end grateful has been preserved into my time in some form - The Upanishads. Whatever the laws of karma it would be a great pity, I think, to have to re-invent that particular wheel.

This year:

Has been somewhat unspectacular for me till now. But I hope I know better than to chafe at unspectacular these days.

14 years from now:

I have no idea. I hope my knee does not hurt.


I tag Floozieloo.


* I started to do this tag on Friday.