Friday 30 June 2017

Dayashankar ki Diary



I must confess that I am a little partial to soliloquies. And Dayashankar ki Diary made me a little more biased. From a clerk, to a lover, to the king of Nepal and finally as a mentally impaired man, Ashish Vidyarthi is an absolute delight to watch. Dayashankar ki Diary is a tale of a small town man who comes to Mumbai to nurse his dreams of becoming an actor but ends up with a clerical job. Fed up of daily rejection and humiliation, Daya spins a web of fantasies and soon gets entangled in them. Amidst all this, Daya falls in love with his boss's daughter. The scene where he tries to gauge the girl's feeling befriending her dog is a show stealer. Despite being engulfed by a make believe world , how the small town Daya craves for his mother's love and worries about arranging sufficient dowry for his sister's marriage  is heart rending. My only complain with the play is that it was a little too short . Probably I was too engrossed and lost track of time.

The protagonist of the play loses himself in the mad rush of the city. It made me wonder how much this city has changed me. It has been five long years and I think I buried the old me long time back in the coffin of social acceptance and aspirations. But then, it is not just a story of this city, it is a story of adult life, story of failures, the inability to cope with them. We all have our shortcomings. Some of us are fat, not pretty( as per the societal norms), some of us never make it to the that premier college we pined to all our life, a few of us are lovelorn, and some of us are misfits wherever we go. And we all have a story to protect us from -OURSELVES. In the battle against society, we ending up fighting against ourselves. Ironical, isn't it?

I think there is a little bit of Dayashankar in each one of us. We all spin yarns to buffer ourselves when the going gets tough.How much we succumb to our fantasies, only that varies.

1 comment:

  1. Superb... Where do you watch these plays? I would love to watch some, used to participate a lot in college...

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