BlogCatalog

Smooth Slaughter

Butter And Mashed Bananas

(The following is a review of a play I saw approximately a year and a half back. An old piece, it is a play that should not be missed. )

 

 

There is an urban legend that talks about how the concoction of butter and mashed bananas is used to tighten a noose before a hanging. When it comes to strangling, be it criminals or innocent voices, the Indian democracy does a really good job. This is what the three actors on stage prove meticulously in the play- Butter and Mashed Bananas.

The play essentially follows the trajectory of one boy, born – upside down, after exaggerated coercing – out of an accidental night of passion, to parents of opposing political loyalties. The boy’s mother is a Leftist-feminist while the father is right wing. Their views are projected on the child where, they attempt to, literally, teach him the importance of putting the ‘left’ or the ‘right’ foot forward first. This leads to such utter confusion that the boy learns to make his way by hopping from one place to another.

Beyond this muddle caused to the one stuck in the middle, there is also the issue of censorship that is society’s answer to the constitutional right to freedom of speech. As the narrator sits on the pink bucket and tells the audience the tale of Karisma Kapoor’s ‘sexy’ sorrow, and its remedial through omission in the right places of the song, one can’t help but laugh and shake their head at the same time.

There is always someone who will get up and say: “how dare you say that??!” The boy, having been thrown out of his home for yelling ‘Papa!’ in retort to bullies who call him ‘chicken’, now writes the biggest, best-selling book for which he even gets awards and fellowships. He becomes world famous; only, India does not belong to that world. No one has read his book because it hasn’t gotten past the censor board. It dies just like the man who is shut up in a room with a huge poster of a woman’s breasts, as an experiment and isn’t given any food or water for a week. The experiment is successful: the man dies due to overexposure. Pitiful justification.

When, finally, the boy decides to take the plunge into politics, and form his own party based on his own ideals- “the truth shall be told” and “the guilty shall be punished”- he is accused of defamation by both the Prime Minister and the leader of Opposition. These two, though successful in suppressing the voice of this over-ambitious-new-age butterfly, fail miserably at quelling their pangs of burning desire for each other. More than hands are joined, as their combined party emerges stronger than ever before.

This is a 70 minute production by the Harami Theatre, directed by Ajay Krishnan who, in this season, plays the role akin to a narrator. He sits in one corner of the stage with his guitar, giving the background score and lending his voice to the prologue and the epilogue. The stage is minimally attired, as are the actors, who wear only vests and lungis. The supporting actors have ghungroos tied on one leg each. They use only one white sheet and a pink plastic bucket as props. Much goes on behind the screen and yet it does not hide the truly shameful tenets of the Indian administrative set up. The men dance to fill up the uncomfortable silences that come up when they make their points.

The play is not to be missed. From lewd jokes to serious slaughter, the play eases itself into the conscience of the audience. It makes you squirm in your seat, and not only because you’re laughing your ass off. In the end, you too might end up wishing you’d never left the comfort of your first home- the womb- all those years ago.

Re-discovered Patriotism

Michael Wood in Amritsar

I recently laid hands on (or more like, was persuaded into getting hold of, by Shishir, and all thanks to him) this BBC  TV series by Michael Wood called The Story Of India. A six part documentary, shot over 18 months of extensive travelling across India and the extended subcontinent, he traces India’s roots, the circumstances of the birth of its diversity, the richness of a land that has seen civilisations old, new and constant and varied. So far, I’ve reached the point of entry of the East India Co, with the Mughal era just about descending into depravity, aka Chapter 6 in this fantastic story.

Considering the fact that history was not my favourite subject at school, since then, I was still dreaming of being an engineer/CA/big shot corporate honcho at some MNC, it comes as a pleasant surprise that a lot of what the man talks of in his travels still rings a bell in distant dusty cabinets of the mind. And then again, a whole other list of things he talks about are completely new.

Like the fact that king Kanishka’s empire included Afghanistan and a sizeable part of Central Asia.

And that Ayodhya was not a precise location till Chandragupta Vikramaditya II decided to use that myth as a guiding force of governance and good living.

And then some even more astonishing revelations: India has, over the past 2,500 years or so, been under the rule of almost every dominant existing religion in the world today.

That the so-called hatred between Hindus and Muslims isn’t a product of Partition, but has been an ebbing and flowing undercurrent that has existed since Muhammad Ghazni’s invasion, but which came to a significant rest during Akbar’s reign.

What Michael Wood, the historian, does is build up an enormous tale of various warriors, religions, holy men, gods, kings, peoples, philosophies, events and look at how all the many traditions the land has hosted and what they left behind for this soil. Effectively, the point he’s trying to make, it seems to me, is that India’s richest attribute is its multiculturalism. There is such a depth behind what has happened here, when time and space have coincided, over and over again, to generate myths, legends and reality still more fabulous.

What Michael Wood, the presenter has done, is to stand in a busy Mathura street and chat with a party of 9 female pilgrims, sit down to lunch with a Tamil agricultural family, watch Krishna kill Kansa and rid Mathura of it’s evil king in one of our local stage performances, talk to professors, play holi and basically get wholly enamoured and embossed into the colours of the land. And he speaks with such awe, love, amazement, enthusiasm and what not, that you are intoxicated, not only with him and his unending warmth and readiness to embrace, but also by what our own country has to offer us.

After all, we do live in a country where there are maybe 3 million gods ( “Or is it 3,30 million gods?!” he muses many a time), where the monsoons have revealed the treasure trove that this land is to the West, where some of the greatest discoveries and inventions, and religions, it is important to add, have not faced the kind of stigma and trauma that Galileo was forced to undergo, whose GDP was the largest at more than one point of time in AD history and whose people know the art of adjustment and happiness, at least from a macro, Western point of view.

The man is proud of himself for having discovered this beauty. It would be travesty not feel proud of actually being part of it.