Bulleya ki jaana main kaun

JustUs Repertory's AHAM SITA Tour Schedule

AHAM SITA

(Written, directed and narrated by Gowri Ramnarayan)

Dance: Vidhya Subramanian

Recorded Vocal: Savita Narasimhan and Aditya Prakash

Music Direction: Gowri Ramnarayan

Lighting Design: B Charles

SCHEDULE

SAN JOSE

Fri, April 8, 2016, 7.30 pm 

PHOENIX

Fri April 15, 2016, 7 pm 

Sun, April 17, 2016, 4 pm 

AUSTIN 

Sat, April 23, 2016, 6.30 pm 

ATLANTA

Sun, April 24, 2016, 4 pm 

CHICAGO 

Wed, April 27, 2016, 6pm

International House, University of Chicago 

1414 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637

Fri, April 29, 2016, 

NIU Naperville Meeting & Conference Center

1120 E. Diehl Street, Naperville, IL 60563

CONTACT 312 436 2789, mridu.sekhar@gmail.com

www. kalapriya.org

Gowri Ramnarayan's US tour: AHAM SITA

With dance by Vidhya Subramaniam and Savita Narasimhan's recorded voice

(Photographs will be added later)

Our first show at San Jose went fabulously.

The theatre is clean, spare, nothing to write about, lighting basic mostly because we had to give cues, 

no lighting man here.

These limitations did not matter. 

But the audience! Their response was astonishing. They were with the production right through.

And sent some really interesting observations. 

The photos by Swagato are really special

Gowri Ramnarayan

I enjoyed how this popular theme was developed and presented from the feminine perspective.The narrator cum sutradhara, Gowri Ramnarayan, who wrote and emoted the characters of Sita, Urmila, Ahalya, Soorpanakha and Mandodari, was very convincing and effective. She set up the context and moved the story along succinctly. 

Vidhya Subramaniam's  finessed dancing and emoting of Sita from when she was a young innocent girl to when she was a jaded, used, rejected and finally a defiant queen was also equally enthralling. The costume changes with simply a dupatta was brilliant. 

The minimalistic stage setting, props and lighting were all well thought out and executed,( although the spotlights lacked the intensity or angle to reveal your nuanced facial expressions. Problem with most theaters for dance). 

The recorded music by Savita Narasimhan and Aditya Prakash augmented our experience of the storyline and characters. 

The music in many Indian languages with so much varied content, including konnakol, in just the appropriate ragas, was also very much appreciated. 

The message in the end that each one of us is Sita, and who likewise need to break the stereotypical mold, refusing to allow others to define us, was very powerful and timely. 

Overall, it was a satisfying, thought provoking and enjoyable performance making us want more.

Prema Sriram

Notes from Kalakshetra

Part 1

Nostalgia is wishful thinking in reverse gear. At least that could be the worst case scenario when an old man like me settles down with a drink like Mr Mulliner at the Anglers' Bar and begins to unleash his tales of fancy from the past, always seen through rose-tinted spectacles.

At its best, however, nostalgia can make you stop and ponder a while amidst the frenetic business of life. If you happen to be honest and objective, and not a victim of syrupy sentimentality, you can actually take stock of both the past and the present, try to see where we have evolved as humans and artists or sportspersons, and where we have allowed time and technology to force shortcuts on us, thus depriving us of something precious that may never come back.

As a writer on cricket, I am invariably asked to recall the past in fascinating ways my editors conjure up. ''How would the greats of my era have fared in today's cricket?'' is a constant refrain. Every time I succumb to such pressures, I find I annoy as many people as I please. Nostalgia- lovers enjoy these stories from the past, though they often accuse me of playing favourites or forgetting to mention their own heroes. Of course, those who worship at the altar of the spectacular present have little patience with what they see as my partisan preference for the past masters. Sometimes, it can all turn out be a lose-lose situation.

Watching some Kalakshetra dancers and musicians past and present at the recent Bani Festival stitched together by the director of Kalakshetra, her staff and her students, I was curious to test my own nostalgia quotient against acceptable parameters of objectivity.  The chronologically graded format of the programme the evening the Kalakshetra bani was presented enabled me to measure the young talent on view with the remnants of the consummate artistry of the seniors, almost all of them septuagenarians today.

The performances of the youngsters who gave margam displays in groups of six gladdened the heart. I shall write about the individual artists in a later post, but it is good to see that the strong foundation laid by Rukmini Devi and strengthened by the early efforts of the likes of Sarada Hoffman and several other good teachers has resulted in a continuing vibrancy of tradition and excellent adherence to techniques. The all round good taste of the institution still pervades every aspect of the programmes offered by Kalaksetra--from the beautiful stage decor, and lovely costumes (though these have grown more ornate through the decades),  to the well-mannered courtesy and quiet dignity of the staff senior and junior as we;; as the volunteers. I can hear murmurs that chaos occasionally tends to rule, but that is preferable to efficient rudeness. Vocalist Harikrishnan was in sublime form, his raga suddham and seamless, sruti-perfect voice an object lesson to many practitioners of Carnatic music. His elaboration of the raga Sahana was easily the best I have heard in many a summer.  

Among the veteran dancers, Shanta and VP Dhananjayan and A Janardhanan gave us glimpses of the technical skill and poignant interpretation of the lyric and theme that made them special in their heyday, Balagopalan stole the show with his extraordinary abhinaya in a cameo appearance. The nattuvangam by Savithri Jagannatha Rao would have won the approval of the giants of yesteryear. It was firm, precise and dignified.

To return to the ambience that made the event so refreshing, the floor seats were, as always, occupied by studious youngsters and some superfit oldies, eagerly drinking in the action on stage. Here again I could not help remembering how 40 years and more ago, I sometimes joined my wife and children of the family as a member of the tarai ticket audience. (The first hints of our mortality were not so subtly conveyed to us when in time the ushers and usherettes started directing us to the chairs). 

It was from these vantage seats that we watched in awe as Janardhanan and Venkatachalapathy as Rama and Lakshmana, Krishnaveni  as Sita and Balagopalan as Hanuman wove magic before our eyes. That every role in the Ramayana dance drama was paid the utmost attention was illustrated for example by the diminutive Stella Uppal's hypnotic gambolling as the golden deer which made Sita's fascination so believable. The grand music by Mysore Vasudevacharya and others sung by Sitarama Sarma, Pasupathy and others often made you turn year eyes away from the stage towards the orchestra pit. It is no exaggeration to say that Hariprasad and company had a similar effect on us last week.  (To be continued).

HLF Part 3

A festival of people and literature

Hari Mohan Paruvu used to be a tall, strapping young fast bowler. When I met him recently at the Hyderabad Lit Fest, I realised that he was still a tall, strapping fast bowler, though looking slightly older than when he played in the Ranji Trophy during 1985-87.

Hari has become a successful author and life coach, with his books and his movie, his lectures and workshops for cricket aspirants and yes, dance students! I first met him at the Chennai launch of his first novel The Men Within, and remember walking up to him and telling him how much  I enjoyed reading the book (though I don't trust my memory any more). We met again at two book events at Hyderabad (the release there of my Third Man) and Chennai (a discussion on Hari's 50 Not Out and Third Man) moderated by our common friend, the brilliant Krishna Shastri Devulapalli (though anyone who knows Krishna knows that he is incapable of moderating anything).

As I said before, I owed my participation in HLF 2016 to Hari's efforts and he also conducted my panel with admirable flair. I also caught a brief glimpse of his workshop focussing among other things on goal setting for youngsters in the same festival. Hari made me feel welcome at HLF and also took me to Vidyuth Jaisimha's cricket academy, where I struggled to bowl one good ball in six deliveries I attempted, and he gave me evidence that he can still bowl impressively. Looking at him I had no trouble believing his account of his regular stint bowling in the nets, even if he is himself more than 50 not out today.  We had a long and meaningful conversation with his efforts towards sports promotion and teaching of life lessons based on his cricket experiences, and hopefully, our paths will intersect in this regard some day.

The organisers of the festival were a friendly and helpful lot who made the delegates feel at home. Prof. Vijay Kumar was a cheerful, sprightly presence throughout the festival, and Jayesh Ranjan IAS was again a most helpful head of the organising committee. The theme of the festival was most thoughtfully inclusive of the marginalised, such as dalits and transgenders, the differently abled and the differently oriented. I was heartened by the overt support HLF extended to free speech and dissent, nowhere better exemplified than in the pride of place given to Nayantara Sahgal. The sessions featuring Kiran Nagarkar and Pervez Hoodbhoy of Pakistan were brilliant examples of discourse that rose above jingoistic noise(More about these in the next instalment).

Meeting Amala Akkineni after a considerable gap was one of the highlights of my HLF experience. I first met her when she was a teenage student of Chennai's Kalakshetra, one of the brightest talents to have learnt bharatanatyam there, and I watched her grow into a fine dancer, film actor, and burgeoning champion of animal welfare, before she moved to Hyderabad. Listening to her speak at HLF was a revelation: her espousal of the cause of animals and our ecology is marked by such wit and wisdom.

My FB friend Subbarayudu Kameswara did me proud by attending my panel discussion and getting his copy of my book signed by me. The learned professor was soft spoken and modest to a fault. My former State Bank colleague BS Prakash was an enthusiastic visitor to the Lit Fest and possibly its biggest buyer of books. I cannot thank him enough for the trouble he took over me during the three days.

­

HLF Part 2

A festival of people and literature

If Mahesh Rangarajan, the environmental historian, was brilliant in his discourse on Nature and Nation, the anchor Aloka Parasher-Sen was a knowledgeable facilitator. The session left me, an ignoramus on the subject, thirsting for more, proving quite expensive as I bought every book by Mahesh Rangarajan available at the HLF bookstall.

The panel on Free Speech and Censorship was made memorable by Nayantara Sahgal’s gentle and supportive ways with the firebrand Maharashtrian Dalit writer Urmila Pawar, who was initially quite diffident about her lack of English. In this session and a later one, Pawar spoke of how all Dalit writing started out swearing angrily at God. She was not only the first Dalit woman writer from her part of the world , she was the first feminist author as well.

That evening I met my old friend George Abraham, blind, and one of the best communicators I have known,  in the hotel lobby. With him was Shakila Maharaj, a South African, also blind and a communicator. Though ready to drop at the end of a long day, I decided to wait up for George for a cup of coffe at the restaurant after he returned from his visit to a friend. George, a resident of Delhi,  and I go back a long way—since 2000 in fact, when he came to Chennai to organize the cricket  World Cup for the Blind and I interviewed him for the city portal Chennai Online. When we met around 11pm, it was well worth the wait, for George had stories to tell, stories of his exciting media ventures. He even produced a teleserial, Nazar ya Nazariya, stressing the need to empower the physically challenged. His Score Foundation helps people with disability and he is a proud man who has made light of his own disability, caused in childhood by an attack of meningitis.

George’s friend Shakila is a South African of Indian origin who lives in Durban, and speaks with an Irish accent, thanks to her early years in Ireland. Her husband Maharaj defied parental disapproval to marry her despite her disability. Shakila has had a successful career in the fashion business and now does audio descriptions for films so that the blind can enjoy them in the theatre. She has also written a film script, a comedy with three blind men and their loves, with a dash of mystery thrown into it.

If meeting George after a long gap was thrilling, with Shakila, it was instant friendship. It felt great to be accepted with total trust by someone you have just met. The three of us really hit it off.

George’s panel Through the Lens’s Eye had another member, Partho Bhowmick, who incredibly teaches the visually impaired photography. The panel was moderated by
L Subramani, a blind journalist who guided the conversation expertly, bringing out the best in each panellist. When I asked a question during Q&A time, Subramani stunned me—and the audience—by declaring that he once worked under me and that he owed much of his success to me! I, of course, remembered that he had been a sports correspondent reporting to me at Chennai Online. I was not only embarrassed but moved to tears as Subramani dwelt on my sterling but entirely imaginary qualities. I accosted him immediately after the discussion, and said, “Why did you do what you did? You know I never had a kind word for you when we worked together. I was always pulling you up for some lapse or other, even accusing you of laziness.´ “That is what you did for me sir,” Subramani replied. “You made me an honest, hard working journalist not taking advantage of my disability.”

Through the Lens’s Eye was accompanied by a delightful side show orchestrated by the lovely Anju Khemani—who runs the organization Drama for the Deaf—and a number of deaf members of her theatrical troupe, for whose benefit she was signing furiously throughout the session.

The next afternoon, Shakila and Partha Bhowmick were in conversation with Anju Khemani. Both explained their work most interestingly to  a most attentive audience.


I normally do not ask questions at seminars and panel discussions, rather afraid of making a fool of myself, but this time I could not resist the temptation, only I was a bit late off the starting block. Anju said, “We are already running late, but I will allow this one question from a special guest, who took a special interest in a blind employee. In fact, I am going to invite Mr Ramnarayan to HLF again next year.”

It was all rather heady, not at all what I had expected at HLF. Little did I realise, though, that more pleasant surprises were in store on the morrow.

A festival of people and literature

Part I

The Hyderabad Literary Festival has been the undoubted highlight of 2016 so far for me, yet I have taken over two months since my return from the city to post this note. The explanation is simple: I plunged into work, which has included at least three major events I was involved in. This is the first breather I have had in a long while.

It was a memorable experience, even if my own panel discussion, ostensibly centred around my book Third Man was a bit of a damp squib. I’ll come to that later, after I try to recapitulate my many enjoyable moments between 7^th and 10^th January, especially the wonderful interactions with other participants famous and not so famous.

My discovery of the festival was the delightful Nayantara Sahgal, gentle, vulnerable and friendly, not at all like the firebrand I expected, especially after the way she has critiqued the Indira Gandhi family over the last few years, and her crime of returning the Sahitya Akademi award in protest against the fundamentalist violence unleashed against writers and thinkers in the recent past. Her speech at the opening ceremony on the 7^th was a well reasoned plea to all of us, especially writers, to beware of the rising tide of intolerance in the country and resist it with all our might.ESL Narasimhan, the governor of AP and Telangana, spoke like a leader of the Sangh parivar, lambasting Sahgal in words that can only be described as unchivalrous. Over the next few days Sahgal was to frequently tell us how scared she was of the general violence in the air, but how impelled to speak her mind nevertheless for the sake of all of us who wish to safeguard our freedom. Kiran Nagarkar, with Nayantara Sahgal my breakfast mate on a couple of occasions, echoed this fear of Sahgal during his talk at one of the sessions. The theatre and film actor Dr Mohan Agashe had a slightly different say in the matter: he demanded of artists that they deal with threats to freedom through subtlety and circumvention. Both Sahgal and Nagarkar had to deal with rabble rousers apparently planted in their sessions. Nagarkar fielded some of the bullets deftly by declaring his love of our epics, which however did not mean he had to support fundamentalist stances by our politicians and their less cultured allies.

Now to come to my own panel discussion on cricket writing, it became a session about my khadoos Mumbaiyya-Hyderabadi former teammate Vijay Mohan Raj—who came to the organisers’ rescue by filling in for the absent Vijay Lokapally, my would-be fellow panelist—decided the whole hour belonged to him and hogged the strike, not forgetting to deliver a homily on ethics to me and the audience. Poor anchor Harimohan Paruvu, who had worked hard to persuade the festival authorities to invite me as a delegate, was denied the strike for far too long to score. I think I made the best of a bad bargain. At least one member of the audience—Jonathan Gil Harris, distinguished author of The First Firangis—seemed to agree. 

The casualty was my book Third Man, which I was forced to wave frantically at the audience—some of them disappointed stragglers from the next tent where the actor Shriya Saran failed to turn up—to let them know I had actually written a book.

I was not unduly disappointed, because I thoroughly enjoyed the many brilliant lectures and interactions I attended and the wonderful warmth of everyone I met—the organizers, the audience and the delegates. (To be continued)