Indian Writing

The final few days of the Mumbai Festival this weekend. A~ and I are going out of town, but we’ll be back on Sunday evening and I hope to see Padatik’s Hindi play Ho Sakta Hai Do Aadmi Do Kursiyaan at the Ravindra Natya Mandir. Shows at 5:30 and 8:30 pm, 75 minutes long, written and directed by Vinay Sharma, with Shakil Khan and Vinay Sharma in the cast.

Also on Sunday, at 6 pm in The Readers’ Shop (address 1 / 2, Crystal Co-op. Hsg. Scty., Next to Santacruz Police Station, Juhu Road, Santacruz West) is a Vikalp screening of the film Aamakaar directed by Surabhi Sharma.

Short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the New Yorker:

The first time our house was robbed, it was our neighbor Osita who climbed in through the dining-room window and stole our TV and VCR, and the “Purple Rain” and “Thriller” videotapes that my father had brought back from America. The second time our house was robbed, it was my brother Nnamabia, who faked a break-in and stole my mother’s jewelry.

It is the season of the jhadi patti rang bhoomi, and P.Sainath watches a play in Vidarbha:

It was well past midnight when the farmer said he was fed up with the way things were going. He could not take it any more, he told us. A farmer’s life was not worth living. It was pretty cold by this time. Yet no one budged and you could feel the tension in the air. The play is called atma hatya (suicide) and we were part of an audience of 6,000 watching transfixed at that late hour. Theatre may be struggling to survive in the metros, but here in rural Vidharbha, it thrives. This is the season of jhadi patti rang bhoomi. Which loosely translates as “theatre of the jungle belt.”

Everybody is part of it. “We have farmers, tailors, painters and vendors in our plays,” says Ghulam Sufi of the Venkatesh natya mandali that is staging Atma Hatya. “That’s one reason why it resonates so much with ordinary people.” Mr. Sufi plays tabla for the 60-member troupe. We watched him do that — and saw him dash off in between to don make up and do a swift cameo in the play. The main carpenter of the troupe whom we had seen at work earlier also made an appearance on the rotating stage he had set up that afternoon.