My exposure to the world of art has been through different mediums and from each of these I could carry something to the other. It is NOT theatre with which I started my journey in performing arts. As a child I was into elocution and fine arts from the early age of five. What influenced me or shaped me into the artist that I am today is not any fascinating work of theatre or a theatre artist, but my Drawing teacher (Drawing Sir for me) and my Hindi tuition master (Hindi Sir for me). Truth is often stranger than fiction!
My Drawing sir was an avid backpacker who would dare to travel penniless but never pen (and paper) less. He would come back with a book full of sketches and teach us from those sketches. So while we were learning brush and pencil strokes, we were also learning many stories alongside.
The landscapes of Himalayas, the monuments of Bodh Gaya, the rope bridge in Laksman Jhula, the by lanes of Benaras and more. I found them familiar when I traveled to these places later. I realized the importance of a depicting life through a picture so as to make it speak – not just a thousand words but also tell a story. Therefore whenever I speak/write, I focus on the story which the piece of art expresses.
The landscapes of Himalayas, the monuments of Bodh Gaya, the rope bridge in Laksman Jhula, the by lanes of Benaras and more. I found them familiar when I traveled to these places later. I realized the importance of a depicting life through a picture so as to make it speak – not just a thousand words but also tell a story. Therefore whenever I speak/write, I focus on the story which the piece of art expresses.
My Hindi Sir was unconventional for a language teacher. A railway employee with a degree in Statistics giving part time lessons! It was not his command of the language that influenced me but his love for poetry and Kavi Sammelan’s (Poetry festivals). All the poems in my syllabus, he had heard somewhere in some Lit fair while growing up and he would start with a story about that – what the poet was going through in those days, the politics he was involved in, what a poet explained in a Lit fair while reading his poem, which of the poems resulted from a faux pas in a Lit fair and so on. This fascinated me and made me love poetry and get to its soul. It made a remarkable difference to my elocution skills. And till today I look into the soul of what I am reading, not just what is in or in between the lines. It helps me to get into the character and connect with my audience better.So when I did theatre at University (IIT), I wasn’t a novice because I had already been telling and living stories through different mediums of art. Theatre became an extension of the way I would express myself otherwise. I was part of English, Hindi and Bengali theatre societies and we did multiple plays every year. The most memorable ones were Faulty Towers, Julius Caesar, and a stage adaptation of A Few Good Men in English, Court Martial and Titumir (an Utpal Dutt classic) in Hindi, and, Gondi (adaptation of Caucasian chalk circle), Tota Kahini (Tagore’s satire), Jagganath, and my favorite Mareech Sangbad in Bengali.
Mareech Sangbad is an amazing play in which the setup has a protagonist – a magician – conjuring characters in a street play and tells the story of Mareech- a mythological character from the Ramayana, who is a loyal pawn in the wicked game of his master Ravana. Times change from mythology to reality, from a medieval Indian village peasant to an American soldier in the Vietnam war, there are similar tales of greed, manipulation, evil intentions and similar Mareecha’s- Ishwar & Gregory. But the magician spins hope! The characters revolt so much that in the end poet Valmiki has to arrive to restore order and hope. I was so deeply connected to the soul of this play that even in real world, in last twenty-two years, I can spot a Mareech when I see one!My wife is a trained classical dancer. When she rehearses at home and asks for my opinion, I just consider one thing- was she able to connect with me or did she just impress me with a sequence of synchronized steps. Ditto for my feedback to my team mates for our dance theatre productions. As a voice artist for dance theatre especially when narrating live, I not only need to connect with the audience but also with the dancer who is seamlessly presenting what I narrate. For me that is what art and the artist is all about-the ability to connect! And this is the key – whether I go by the script or sometimes off the script and improvise.
