Personalities

Parnab Mukherjee's Profile:

A media analyst and a performance consultant by profession, Mr Parnab Mukherjee is one of the leading alternative theatre directors' of the county.He divides his time between Delhi, Kolkata and the Darjeeling hills. Currently, a consultant with a publishing journal, Parnab has earlier worked for a sports fortnightly, English daily and a Bengali daily. He is an acclaimed authority on Badal Sircar's theatre and specialises in theatre-for-conflict-resolution .
He is considered as a leading light in alternative theatre in the country having directed more than 50 productions of performance texts including three international collaborations. He has also performed 10 full length solos which includes an acclaimed River series of plays on trafficking, HIV and segregation and FootHills to Hills-a series of plays with Darjeeling as the living inspiration.
As one of the leading exponents of third theatre, Parnab has created a personal idiom of using spaces for theatre exploration. He has extensively worked on a range of human rights issues which include specific theatre projects on anti-uranium project struggles in Jadugoda and Turamdihi, Save Tenzin campaign, rehabilitation after Bhopal Gas tragedy, shelter issue of the de-notified tribes, a widely acclaimed cycle of seven plays against Gujarat genocide, and a range of issues on north-east with special refernece to Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

Four of his most major workshop modules : Freedomspeak, The Otherness of the Body, City as a Text and The Conflicting Body has been conducted with theatre groups' and campuses all over the country
He has written four books on theatre.


Group

Best of Kolkata Campus has completed 15 years of doing focussed campus theatre in found spaces. It has produced a number of young theatre workers' who are active in the cultural arena. It is a loosely formed collective of a bunch of individuals who believe that theatre is an important an independent tool of dissent outside the ambit of party politics. Some of the most memorable productions of the group include Hamletmachine, Antigone, Raktakarabi-an urban sound opera, Bhul Rasta, Kasper, They Also Work, River Monologues, Dead-Talk series and And the Dead Tree Gives no Shelter .

 

Ramu Ramanathan:

Shylock is living in Masjid Bunder, Cleopatra dresses as a Koli woman and Othello smokes a cigarette wearing the half- bewildered, half-afraid look of smack addicts on a Mumbai street. They aren't the hallucinations of pot-addled imaginations, but real people who seem to fit the bill of Shakespearean characters, captured on camera by the students of IIT Powai's Industrial Design Centre and the Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture.

Acting on the orders of Ramu Ramanathan, whose theatre workshop they attended last year, the students turned the city inside out looking for their quarries. "The students were told to look for people who tend to go unnoticed," Ramanathan explained. Taking his cue from these pictures, the playwright dashed off Shakespeare and She in time for Hamara Shakespeare, a three-day festival in Chennai. It plays in Mumbai this fortnight at the Max Mueller Bhavan.

Holding the play together is a pair of unlikely friends, Insomnia and Aisha. Insomnia is a rich kid who "probably had a car under her backside right from the time she was born", said Ahlam Khan, who plays the character. Aisha, on the other hand, comes from a poor, conservative Muslim family. The glue that keeps them together, Insomnia explains to her shrink, is Shakespeare. Aisha, who refers to the bard as Sheikh Sahab, triggers Insomnia's insight that Shakespeare is not the preserve of the South Mumbai theatrewallahs who take pride in speaking Queen's English; he belongs to everyone. Shakespeare "could have easily been inspired by the normal man walking down the road", Khan pointed out. "Anybody could have been a Shylock, anybody could have been a Cleopatra."

In fact Ramanathan finds present-day Mumbai remarkably similar to sixteenth-century London. In the play, Aisha draws parallels with Mumbai and Shakespeare's London: "The clamour, the clutter. The endless jostling. Busy bastis and make-shift tradeshops. The stench and the shit. No open spaces. Immigrants and traders and their labourers arriving every day. Infectious maladies. Mosquito bites, TB, pneumonia, encephalitis, maladies, infections, exhaustion." To underscore this similarity, Ramanathan projects the photographs his students took of people on the streets of Mumbai.

The play is as much about Mumbai as it is about the universality of Shakespeare. "The invention of the city is a great invention," Ramanathan declared. "Mumbai, for me, is a place where people have come together. The roads and streets are spaces in the city where difference disappears. All these people, who are they? People who have come together with a common desire, a common vision."

It's odd he should say that. As the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena's attacks on north Indian taxi drivers in February showed, Mumbai is not the all-embracing city it's perceived to be. But Ramanathan insists that Mumbaikars are perfectly capable of living in harmony. The fact that Insomnia and Aisha transcend class barriers to become buddies proves this, he says.

The two friends in the play discover that living in India's melting pot has a price: they have to deal with Mumbai's chaos and confusion. Women have it harder as "it still is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view", Ramanathan pointed out.

Perhaps that's why Insomnia has sleepless nights and needs to see a therapist? "It could be because of the city," Khan said. "It could be because she's an intelligent woman. I think the smarter you get and the more intelligent you get the more problems and issues you start having with people and things around you.

Personalities 2007  >>