Odd jobs in Delhi

Just read a story in the Sunday Guardian about handpainted signs, which reminded me of seeking out the juice stall sign painter Charan Singh, in Chandni Chowk sometime in the summer of 2007. So I dug up four short sketches I did as part of that long-ago Time Out Delhi cover story on unusual occupations. Enjoy.

Juice-stall sign painter

Charan Singh
Makes: Rs 60-200 per sign


(Photo credit: Abhinandita Mathur)

Charan Singh wasn’t always a painter of signs. He used to have a job in the railways, until he decided to devote himself full-time to the kind of work he really enjoys. That was sometime in the 1960s. Singh doesn’t seem to have any regrets, and his sons Subhash and Anil have also learnt the art. (Though Subhash points out that this is not all he does.) Charan Singh claims to have invented the distinctive style of the Delhi juice-stall sign. “I started it,” he said. “Others try to copy it, but they fail.”

Whether Singh really is the sole repository of the art is uncertain, but his house-cum-workshop in Sarai Topkhana (just off HC Sen Road in the Chandni Chowk area) is definitely a storehouse of colour. Prepared signs in plastic or rexine hang all along the courtyard walls. The smallest is one-and-a-half metres, and the longest three metres. Depending on the client’s demands, the sign can have just lettering, or a fancier design that incorporates flowers, fruits and even faces. “Shah Rukh and Salman are the favourites, especially Salman after Tere Naam. There hasn’t been a Golden Jubilee film after that, na?” said Singh. “Among the heroines, it’s Aishwarya.” Singh can churn out a small sign with lettering in 20 minutes flat, but a larger one with Salman and Ash – yes, the pairing is a bit out of date – can take up to three hours, and costs Rs 200. Has the rise of digital signage affected the business? Yes, said Singh, it has. But he’s upbeat about the future. “Computer mein itni show nahi hai, chamak-dhamak nahi hai. Aap dekhna, haath ka kaam hi chal niklega.”

***

Urdu-English legal translator
Murtaza Ali Khan
Makes: Rs 80 per page
There is an unending series of men at desks with typewriters outside Tees Hazari, Delhi’s largest district court. But not all of them have cupboards full of documents in a script indecipherable to everyone but themselves. Murtaza Ali Khan does. Sitting behind a sheet that serves as an improvised curtain against the scorching sun, Khan pores over legal documents written in shikasta – an Urdu script that is no longer taught and that even those conversant with Urdu find hard to understand. “Shikasta ko broken script kehte hain. Tuti-phuti language aur dilapidated documents, yahi padhta hoon main,” smiled Khan. He used to be a typist, but as more and more people coming to the court with shikasta documents started asking him to translate, he decided to specialise. Most of the documents he receives are property-related ones, which need to be translated for use in court proceedings, to get a bank loan, or sell property. He also gets nikahnamas and talaqnamas. And fatwas. “I get regular customers from banks and the Pakistan Embassy,” said Khan. “Many people even come to me to get old documents forged. They know I have the skill. But I always refuse.” But Khan wants to branch out of translation. Holder of several degrees, including a BA from Delhi College (now Zakir Hussain), an Adeeb Kamil in Urdu from Aligarh, a Bachelors in Education from Taleemghar, Lucknow, and most recently, another BA in Urdu from Maulana Azad National University, Hyderabad, he is all set to start on an LLB.

***

Protest photographer
Joginder Dogra.
Makes: Rs 30-50 per print sold


(Photo credit: Abhinandita Mathur)

For how long have you been a professional photographer?
Twenty years. My uncle was chief photographer in Punjab Kesari, so I came into this line through him. But it was very difficult to establish myself in my own right. I would take photographs, and if they were accepted, they would appear in his name. One day I decided, enough is enough. From that day I started taking my photographs to other places.

When did you make Jantar Mantar your beat?
Well, I had been in Delhi long enough as a photographer, I knew that there is always something happening here. So I started coming regularly. Now it’s part of my daily routine – I come here at 10am and I hang around until four or five in the evening, taking photographs of any protest demonstration that happens.

Who do you sell the photographs to?
Many different places. I have a regular arrangement with two Hindi city papers – Apni Dilli (a weekly) and Meri Dilli (a daily). Apart from them, I offer my photos to press agencies. And, of course, I sell copies to the protestors themselves. Unko chahiye hota hai na, record ke liye. Nowadays, groups who’re planning a demonstration, if they don’t have a photographer, they even contact me in advance, saying arrive at such-and-such a time.

What’s been your greatest Jantar Mantar photo moment?
It was on July 29, 2006. A man set himself on fire. He was from Etah – his kids had been kidnapped and he had been sitting here at Jantar Mantar for some months. Pata nahi usko kya hua, that day he just lost it. He poured oil on himself and lit a match. Nobody else was here, it was three in the afternoon. The photograph I took, I gave it to Associated Press, and they submitted it to the International Photo of the Year competition. It came fifth out of 44,000 submissions. I got a certificate. But I still haven’t received the money.

***

Voiceover artist and mimic
Sundeep Sharma
Makes: Rs 70,000 a month
Sundeep Sharma’s story sounds a bit like one a successful film star might tell about himself: Amitabh Bachchan in a minor key. He grew up in a small town (Bareilly), came to Delhi with “three thousand rupees and the number of Discovery Channel” in his pocket, and was told by his first UTV interviewer that he better “pack his bags and become a writer or something”. But Sharma was sure that his voice was his fortune. Having discovered a talent for oratory in Class XII, when his school principal challenged the boys to match a girl who had won a district-level debate, he prided himself on being the kind of debater who “never came second”.

So he stayed on in Delhi, doing voiceovers for serials on All-India Radio (“mostly ten gaonwalas hearing about some new government scheme”), and working on his skills. “I learnt about voice exercises, pauses, stresses, throwing your voice,” said Sharma. “I did an acting workshop with Barry John in 2003, when I learnt that there are four vocal registers. For instance, to speak in a deep voice, you need to speak from your stomach. For a high, kiddie-type voice, you close your eyes, fill your belly and think that the voice is hitting your skull.”

UTV approved him in his sixth attempt. And then mimicry happened – by accident. Seven months after Sharma auditioned to anchor an NDTV show called Gustakhi Maaf, they called to ask if he’d like to try mimicking Pramod Mahajan, whose voice matched his in texture. “It was when that voice became a hit that I started trying out other voices,” said Sharma. “Now I do Vajpayee, Advani, Mulayam, Shah Rukh, Saif, Nana Patekar, Om Puri, Navjot Sidhu, Sachin Tendulkar. Old film stars like Jagdeep, Jeevan, Dilip Kumar, Prithviraj Kapoor are easy – they had a particular style. Imitating Aamir Khan is difficult, because he changes his voice with each role.” But Sharma prefers doing “normal characters” (a Bihari panwalla or a Bengali babu) to mimicking famous people. And he’s branching out into stand-up comedy. In Sharma’s own words: “Pehle I would call Bareilly and say ki saat baj kar pachpan minute par meri awaz TV par aayegi. Seven years down the line, I feel like I can be on stage as well.”

Published in Time Out Delhi, 2007.

Cheap Dates, or Budget Nights in Delhi

Broke but still intrepid, Trisha Gupta finds an alternative to evenings spent on friends’ terraces. 

(Published in Time Out Delhi, Issue 2. Friday, April 20, 2007)

(A piece I wrote for Time Out Delhi as part of their cover story 'Night City' in 2007.)

The thirty-something couple at the Kolkata Hot Kathi Roll stall look utterly content. The man is tucking into his mutton biryani, while his salwar-kameezed companion munches happily on her single-anda-double-mutton roll. It’s 6.30pm and the 15-odd stalls are doing their usual brisk business at Chittaranjan Park’s Market No 1. Since the evening’s just beginning, we ignore the Rs 40 Bengali thali at Annapurna Hotel and instead sample some of the bread-crumbed delights that emerged from the combined Bengali and British culinary preference for food fried to a crisp. We are spoilt for choice: mochaar chop (made with banana flower), fish chops, mutton or prawn cutlets. We follow this up with some of the best real Bengali sweets in town at Kamala Sweets. To complete the Bengali culture-fest, we head over to Video Palace to drool over the Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak DVDs.

Having sated our senses with sights and smells Bengali, we take an auto to GK-II. Contrary to expectations, M Block Market is a haven for budget-bound drinking: there’s Soul Punjab, Flames and M-52. Tonight, we’re headed to 4S Bar & Restaurant, which lays claim to the longest happy hours in Delhi – from noon to 10.45pm. There are few tables and not the most exciting décor (unless you count the Punjabi “village scenes” on the walls), but at Rs 75 for a bottle of Kingfisher, we’re not complaining.

If you’re in the mood for a movie and don’t want to shell out Rs 150 at a multiplex, head over to nearby Paras cinema at Nehru Place. Settle into a balcony seat (Rs 60) and watch the latest Hindi blockbuster with middle class families from neighbouring colonies. (And if you ever get to Paras on an empty stomach, there’s a little dhaba with red plastic tables to the left of the hall. And there’s a government liquor shop next door. No, we’re not suggesting anything.)

Tonight, however, we’re not in movie mode. Our next stop is a bit further away; Main Bazaar, Paharganj. As we come to a stop in front of New Delhi Railway Station, there can be no doubt: this is where the action really is. All manner of touts, hotel-finders, restaurant waiters and drug-pushers are waiting to sell you your heart’s desire. (And you must desire something, surely, since you’re here?) But it takes all of seven minutes for them to realise we’re not potential customers. Then we’re free to wander down Main Bazaar’s main street, still buzzing at 10.15pm. The place is a treasure trove for silver jewellery, slinky clothes for budget tourists and fashionable but cheap footwear: kolhapuri chappals and embroidered juttis are available at half the Janpath rates. We bought some pretty neat strappy sandals for Rs 150.

We peep into the enticingly relaxed Everest Café where pony-tailed tourists are browsing through their Lonely Planets over coffee. The friendly woman behind the counter offers us chicken momos. But there isn’t a table free, so we move on, only to stop and browse at Jackson’s Books, a tiny stall with an incredible stock of second-hand books left behind by departing tourists.

Heading in the direction of Chuna Mandi, we find the famous Malhotra Restaurant, “highly recommended by Lonely Planet, Rough, Routard and Let’s Go Guide Books”. But we give it a miss tonight, in favour of the surprisingly pleasant rooftop restaurant at Metropolis. We think we’re the only Indians there until we notice the godman (straggly beard, orange kurta, tilak on forehead) who’s here with a firang couple. Stray bits of the conversation waft our way – “Kali is a very angry goddess. How you say, bloodthirsty?” “Did he just say ‘hungry goddess’?” asks my companion mildly. “That’s me,” I say happily, attacking my minute steak.

After dinner, we figure the 9.30pm film at nearby Imperial Cinema should be ending, but no post-film crowd emerges. It turns out the hall screens Bollywood reruns for the princely sum of Rs 20. It’s past 12.30 now, and all the bars have shut shop. So we head to the first “open 24 hours” sign we see – the lobby at Ajay Guesthouse has a billiards table and a German bakery that stays open all night. But you can linger only so long over a slice of date and walnut cake (Rs 35), however large it may be. So at 1am, we finally call it a night.

4S Bar & Restaurant: M-31 GK-II, M Block Market (4166-4317).

Ajay Guesthouse: 5084-A Main Bazaar, Paharganj (2358-3125). Metro New Delhi Railway Station.


Everest Café: 824 Multani Dhanda, Arakashan Road, Paharganj (4166-4317). Metro New Delhi Railway Station.


Flames: First floor, M-61 GK-II, M Block Market (4163-7000).


M-52: M-52 GK-II, M Block Market (2922-5252).


Malhotra Restaurant: Lok Narayan Street, Paharganj, opposite Imperial Cinema (2358-9371). Metro New Delhi Railway Station.


Metropolis: 1634, Main Bazaar, Paharganj, near Imperial cinema (2356-1782). Metro New Delhi Railway Station.


Soul Punjab: M-6 GK-II, M Block Market (6660-6666).

Theatre Spaces: Akshara Theatre

Published as part of an occasional series on Delhi's theatre spaces, in Time Out Delhi. 

Most people in Delhi know Baba Kharak Singh Marg for its long line of emporia selling handcrafted goods from various Indian states, or the Hanuman Mandir. But very few are likely to know that it’s home to what is arguably Delhi’s most charming theatre. Or rather, theatres – there are two.

The plot of land on which Akshara now stands, including the original bungalow, was allotted by the government to dancer-actress Jalabala Vaidya and her husband, playwright-filmmaker Gopal Sharman, in 1972. “We had been contracted by the Royal Shakespeare Company to take our production, the Ramayana, to Britain, and we needed a space to rehearse and to perform. The house was leased to us as nationally eminent artistes, and we sought permission to hollow out a portion of the bungalow and build a 50-seat theatre,” says Jalabala Vaidya.

They got permission, and the indoor theatre was built in the same year – 1972. “We opened with a political satire, Let’s Laugh Again, in which we took the actual words of politicians and made them into a script. It was studded with these bon mots. And we charged tickets. In the beginning we found we weren’t getting audiences, because we weren’t inviting people. So Gopal started to design advertisements, beautiful ads but in the smallest size the newspapers would accept, which was 3cm by one column width.”

It helped. “People started to bring their own cushions and sit on the steps, because all the seats would be full,” says Vaidya. In the mid-80s, they succeeded in getting Akshara registered as a cultural society. In 1998, the indoor theatre was expanded to accommodate 100 people, and an outdoor theatre with 300 seats was constructed at one end of the garden. “The French and the Malayalis have often done shows here,” says Vaidya.

Until 2004, Vaidya and Sharman still performed frequently. Nowadays, the theatre is used for occasional performances by the children who’re part of Akshara’s Deeksha Program. Every Friday and Saturday, children between the ages of 5 and 15 come to Akshara to receive training in theatre through a combination of yoga, poetry, music and actual acting. “In February, the children did two plays – Rudyard Kipling’s The Butterfly that Stamped, and The Train To Darjeeling, which was written by my daughter Anasuya,” says Vaidya. “I’m now trying my level best to encourage young people to use the theatre. In March, a young group of university students did a production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? We have our own technicians, so the lighting and sound will be professionally done, and we would only charge the actual costs – electricity and so on. I only want that they should be open and innovative. And that they do the play for a week, at least.”

Getting there: Follow Baba Kharak Singh Marg in the direction of Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital. Slow down when you see the sign for Gate No. 4 of the hospital. Akshara Theatre is right next to it.

Published in Time Out Delhi, 2008

Sea of Stories: Dastangoi in Delhi

A theatre preview piece for Time Out Delhi:

Audiences aren't flocking to watch dastangoi just because it's a lost art. It's supremely entertaining as well.

Photograph: Abhinandita Mathur

Mahmood Farooqui’s first exposure to dastans was through his father, who often told him to read the single volume of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza which they had at home “to improve his Urdu”. Farooqui was arrested by the fluidity and beauty of the language and by the richly-peopled world of the dastans, where Amir Hamza (uncle of the Prophet Mohammad) sets out to conquer evil, having adventures involving demons, magical beings and tricksters of all sorts on the way – but neither he nor his father imagined that the lost art of dastangoi would be revived in performance by Mahmood himself. “It started when I got an Independent Fellowship from Sarai, a research initiative at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), to study the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. The Urdu version printed in the 1890s, is in 46 volumes, and the only person who has the complete collection is the Urdu scholar SR Farooqui, who happens to be my uncle,” said Mahmood. “But it was a research project. In fact, in March 2005, I was planning a lecture based on my research at the India International Centre, when the IIC people said, why don’t you do a lec-dem? It struck me that the best way of demonstrating the power of the form was to actually perform the dastans. The text demanded to be read aloud.”

Farooqui had little to go by, because almost nothing is known about the conditions in which traditional dastangos showcased their art. It is possible that they had musical accompaniment, and also that large illustrated panels were held up behind the dastango, but what they wore, whether they sat or stood or moved about is unknown. But that first performance at the IIC, which Farooqui did in collaboration with his friend Himanshu Tyagi, was a great success. “It was an invited audience, so there were a lot of Urduwallas, but also regular IIC types and people from Sarai. We weren’t expecting much, but there was a lot of wah-wahi, people were very forthcoming with feedback, and the IIC invited us back to its festival later that year,” Farooqui reminisced. After Tyagi moved to Mumbai in early 2005, Farooqui found a new partner in Danish Husain.

“I remembered Danish from Habib Tanvir’s play Agra Bazar,” said Farooqui. Husain, on the other hand, remembered watching Farooqui and Tyagi perform in Dehra Dun in October 2005. “I was awestruck by the form,” he said, “but when Mahmood asked me to perform with him, I was unsure that I had the capability.” He was persuaded, however, and the duo did their first show together in March 2006. “Traditionally, the dastango performed alone, but I think the idea of two performers is a coup. It breaks the monotony for the audience, and it helps the actors – the moment one is tired, the other steps in,” said Husain.
“And we complement each other: one man is frail and elegant, the other is rotund and rustic. Mahmood is more poetic, eloquent. I’m more rough, more theatrical, like a bhaand. This doesn’t mean that I can’t recite poetry, or that Mahmood can’t be funny, but that’s how things tend to get divided.”

The Farooqui-Husain team has now done at least 30 shows together, mostly performing sections from a single chapter of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza called the “Tilism-e-Hoshruba”. “The title has been translated as “An Enchantment that Steals Away the Senses”, but tilism is virtually untranslatable. It can mean an enchantment, a magical effect, but also an alternative world created by that effect,” said Farooqui. Tilism, however, is only of the four elements of the traditional dastan: the others are razm (warfare), bazm (the world of music, dancing and seduction) and aiyyari (trickery or disguise). Fantasy is thus an integral part of the tales, but they’re also an incredible fund of realistic depictions of Indian life. Magical forests coexist with cities afflicted by famine and fire, shape-shifters walk cheek-by-jowl with miserly banias and flirtatious women.

Has the fantastical quality of the tales made them difficult to appreciate for contemporary urban audiences? Or do people in Delhi and Lahore and Mumbai approach dastangoi through a nostalgic lens – assuming that one can be nostalgic for something one has never known? “Well, certainly there is some nostalgia about two men in Lucknawi attire sitting with a masnad and telling stories in Urdu. I’m uncomfortable with that, but I also know that people’s enjoyment doesn’t rest on nostalgia. Nostalgia may keep them there for 10 minutes, but after that they’re getting into the stories. And if the story is working for you, if it has enough to keep you entertained, it is connected to your world, it has become contemporary,” Farooqui said. “I have felt some pressure to contemporanize the dastans. And yes, these are magical stories, you could go anywhere, you could be in Bushland and in Baghdad at the same time. But if people enjoy, say, classical music today, then it is already contemporary, it doesn’t need to be ‘updated’.”

Though happy with the reaction they’ve got so far, Farooqui is clear that dastans have it in them to go much further. “They straddle the elite and the popular, they invoke Islamicness in a very secular mould, one purely driven towards entertainment. I would like to take the form beyond theatre-going audiences.”

(Time Out Delhi, Sep 2007)

Here's Someone I'd Like You To Meet: Sheila Dhar

A Quality Introduction

The first instalment of my Back of the Book column for Time Out Delhi, about books set in Delhi.

Here's Someone I'd Like You To Meet: Tales of Innocents, Musicians and Bureaucrats is one half of Sheila Dhar's book, Raga'n Josh: Stories from a Musical Life, Permanent Black, Rs 395.

Ordinarily, books that are described as having a “sense of place” are ones that successfully illuminate some particular corner of the universe at some particular time. Sheila Dhar’s sparkling memoir, Here’s Someone I’d Like You To Meet, is a rare exception. Dhar’s book, like her life, straddles several worlds, sketching each with deft strokes. They might all be Delhi worlds, but they are completely different from each other.

Dhar begins with her childhood in Number Seven, Civil Lines, a sprawling bungalow built by her barrister-at-law grandfather to house his even more sprawling family. Her affectionate portrait of the patriarch and the whole Mathur Kayastha clan contains some astute commentary on a traditional, pre-colonial elite’s successful transition to modernity. “Guests to tea were served cakes and sandwiches instead of samosas and barfi; in the evenings there was Scotch whisky and soda… instead of keora sharbat”, and daughters were given an English education.

On the other hand, joint family hierarchy remained inviolable, marriages were invariably arranged, and daughters-in-law were expected to behave. At the heart of this careful cultural jugglery was a gendered division that many of us might recognize from our own families: the Westernized grandfather could publicly dismiss his wife’s rituals and observances as superstitious nonsense, but everyone knew that “in his heart of hearts he was relieved that his wife asserted the old tradition”.

The second strand of the memoir deals with musicians. Dhar stitches different times and places together with effortless ease: the impromptu baithaks of her family home, her early introduction to the aura of classical music through of her father’s involvement with Delhi’s music circles in the 1950s, and her own adult cultural world, centred round music classes, All India Radio recordings and Bharatiya Kala Kendra concerts.

Dhar’s chronological narrative is paralleled by a spatial trajectory through the city: childhood in Civil Lines, married life with her economics professor husband in a decrepit University bungalow, finally ending up in “a magnificent government house on Race Course Road” complete with jacaranda trees and parrots, after her husband became Indira Gandhi’s adviser. Each of these spaces, in turn, opens up a different phase in the life of the city – and the nation. If her childhood contains connections to an older time, where leisure time meant walks by the Jamuna, then the Delhi University years brilliantly delineate the emergence of a national cultural intelligentsia in which Carnatic musicians in the newly-established Department of Music vie with Bengali professors’ wives for the attentions of visiting Americans. The transition to Lutyens’ Delhi allows us to accompany an irreverent insider into 1970s bureaucratic and political circles, with sidesplitting accounts of ministerial wives and Rashtrapati Bhavan dinners.

But it is when Dhar describes her impersonation of Bhaggo Dada ki bahu at an official party that one realizes what made her so admirable a Dilliwali: her clear-eyed recognition that these worlds are impermeable for most people, and that she has had the rare privilege of moving between them. Acting the homely Old Delhi housewife at a starchy New Delhi political dinner was a way of playing these worlds off against each other – but in the warmest, most playful manner.

Published in Time Out Delhi Vol 2, Issue 9, July 25 - Aug 7, 2008.

Back to the future: Mohan Maharishi's Vidyottama

Time has always played the lead in Mohan Maharishi’s work, says Trisha Gupta, and it’s true of his latest as well.

Playwright-director Mohan Maharishi’s new play, Vidyottama, came out of a chance conversation. Maharishi was sitting around chatting with a few friends, when the conversation turned to the legendary Sanskrit poet and playwright Kalidas. “How do we know whether someone called Kalidas produced these works? Suppose his wife wrote and he took the credit?” someone asked. A remark made half in jest, perhaps, but Maharishi was intrigued enough to return to some of Kalidas’s most famous works – Abhigyan Shakuntalam, Meghadootam and Kumarasambhava. “I went through these texts again, and felt that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for a woman to have imagined female beauty in the way it is described in them,” says Maharishi, who spent two decades in Chandigarh as head of Punjab University’s Department of Theatre. However, he found himself increasingly arrested by the dramatic possibilities inherent in the fictive figure of Kalidas’s wife, Vidyottama. “It is believed that Kalidas married the daughter of King Vikramaditya, whose name was either Vidyavati or Vidyottama. But there is very little historical detail available. We are not even clear whether this was Vikramaditya I or II. The tikakas, the commentators who came after him, talked only about his work, not his life. Perhaps it was not fashionable then to talk about a writer’s life,” suggests Maharishi. The lack of biographical certainty, though, gave Maharishi the liberty to more or less create his own characters – something that might otherwise have been much harder. “I have imagined Vidyottama as a very intelligent woman and a brilliant classical dancer. She is also a Cassandra-like figure – she has a boon from Shiva that allows her to see into the future. In fact, to travel to a different time. She disappears for days at a time. And she raises questions that no one else does,” says Maharishi. At one point in Maharishi’s play, Vidyottama asks Kalidas why there are no evil Brahmans in his writings. How is that possible, says Kalidas, my audience will reject me. “Oh,” retorts Vidyottama, “So you admit that to survive, you have to believe whatever your audience believes?” For Maharishi, the play has been a chance to think aloud about the difference between classical art and modern forms of creative expression. “In the classical view of things, raising social issues was not considered the function of art.”  And yet, Maharishi believes that Kalidas’s works exhibit a sense of “connection… with the cosmos” that could not have been created by a writer “completely isolated from the outside world”. It is the figure of Vidyottama who becomes, in Maharishi’s eyes, both Kalidas’s source of inspiration and energy, and the force that threatens to rupture his blissful world. In the play, Kalidas, attempting to write the scene where Shakuntala makes her way to King Dushyant’s court, asks his wife how she would react if her husband returned to his old life and refused to recognise her. “Gali deti,” says the straight-talking Vidyottama. Maharishi thus creates a very contemporary back-story for a famous classical scene. “This scene has perhaps the strongest language ever used by Kalidas, where Shakuntala calls Dushyant ‘anarya’ – one who is not an Arya,” he points out. Kalidas is unhappy with Vidyottama’s criticisms, or her freedom-loving nature, but he can’t do without her. The climactic event in the play is a journey that Vidyottama makes into the future. “She goes somewhere, imaginatively, intellectually or physically – and returns violated. She finds the future so ferocious and violent that she comes back sick. The clash between the past and the present is borne by Vidyottama, on her body,” explains Maharishi. The current play brings together many of Maharishi’s previous interests. He has been exploring the idea of time since he wrote his most famous play, Einstein, in 1994. “Time is as still as this door, this wall behind us,” he says quietly. “This idea that time moves is a very limited concept. Einstein understood that. But we persist in thinking that we have a past and a future… In fact, all time is always present.” Is that why his approach to the “present” is always routed through the past? “I do not wish to be topical, to write about something that will come and go. So I look for symbols. I have always been concerned with the present. But the past is my interest because it refuses to go away. It persists.”

Source : Time Out Delhi Vol. 1 Issue 1. April 6-19 2007