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.

Nothing like Lear

Shakespeare’s king Lear dons the hat of a clown, a lovechild, an abandoned father and a ridiculed man. An unloved, neglected child who tries to reclaim his childhood by being a doting father. To me the play is about an illegitimate child who thinks he is the cause of  misery to his family. He tries to claim acceptance and bring about happiness by choosing to become a jester. Clown, a symbolism of happiness and glee, in the play is an embodiment of grief and sorrow. Grief of a rejected child and an abandoned father. I have seen the play twice and I didn't bat my eyelids even for a moment throughout the 90 minutes of the play on both the occasions. Vinay Pathak does a brilliant job, making the audience split into laughter one moment and reducing them to tears the very next. The way he curses his daughter, just to be filled with overwhelming guilt of cursing his only child, the very next moment.Simply BRILLIANT.” The hand feeds the mouth, the hands feeds on the hand”- This for me was the highlight of the play. Vinay seemed to have this missed this line the second time round.  The audience was quite a dampener on both the occasions, laughing at poignant moments, missing out the underlying message of despair of a heartbroken father.

This is my all time favourite play. It makes me want to sip on that masala chai and go over each line after the play.Every play I go to, I  inadvertently end up comparing it  to this one. Well,Nothing like Lear .Yes sire, nothing like it indeed.

Joke

Fed up with the idiosyncrasies religion brings along with it, Joshi, a successful writer, decides to denounce his faith. He decides to replace God with  his long forgotten childhood fairies. However, he finds it is a daunting task to give up something that is is so deep rooted in our society. By denouncing your faith you just don't sin against god, you sin against the entire society is what he finds out.He finds resistance from everyone he encounters on his journey to "nirvana", from the local cop "Satpute" who refuses to let him throw his idols in the sea, to his wife who gives a heavy donation in the name of god just to pick a bone with him. In the midst of all this, there is a love story thrown in between the two "God fearing" cops. Then there is Satpute's sister, a blind girl who falls in love with Joshi through his writings and shares his belief. The melange finally ends with Joshi finding his fairy in Satpute's sister "Pari". Sigh!. The play did nothing for me. The script seemed jumbled and lacked focus. It began on a high and lost course somewhere in the middle. There were too many parallel stories which instead of helping paint the bigger picture led the audience astray. Just how, the telepathic conversations between Pari and Joshi alluded to the central theme is still a mystery to me. A woman who falls in love with a writer through his writings and a writer who finds his long forgotten fairies in her just because she is named "Pari"neeta was too mainstream for me to digest.The randomness and digression from the central idea of the play was, in fact, quite a task to bear with. Sadly, the love story between the two constables is the only highlight of the play. Nivedita Bhattacharya as the female constable tickles your funny bone and leaves you wanting for more in an, otherwise, dry play. Makrand Deshpande as Joshi, the writer, delivers well. 

The theme of the play held a lot of potential. To bring to light the present state of our society where the shackles of religion have impaired our capacity to think and the reluctance to challenge the established truth was indeed commendable. Turning back to fairies, to me, symbolized going back to one's childhood, an age when inquisitiveness was a state of mind, where every answer was pondered over and challenged. Each one of us has a little of our religious culture ingrained in our day to day routine, from a particular colour to be worn on a specific day to eating habits to humming of a particular chant. But we never seem to question these "sacrosanct" rituals. We just believe whatever the scholars of the faith interpret and feed into our brains. And we all are a witness of what this blind and mind numbing  faith has led us to - absolute chaos. A society where religious fanaticism supersedes humanity.

The play took up a really interesting subject but just kept beating around the bush. It is actually disappointing to see such a great idea being wasted like this. Just a humble request Mr Deshpande, next time you play a similar "joke" kindly attach a statutory warning.

Bombay Talkies

Bombay Talkies is about eight Mumbaikars, who pour out their souls in stories that define Mumbai.Ironically there is nothing “Mumbai” about any of the stories. It could have been any other city in the country but I guess Bombay makes it a little more fascinating.

                                                                   

                                                         

The most poisonous venom ever known is fame. Once bitten, you never recover. Baby Dimple, a former child star discovers it the hard way. Struggling to re launch her career she suffers bouts of hysteria reminiscing her days of stardom. Eventually, she goes down the shuddered path in the hope of finding what she lost ages ago. This seemed more like a stereotypical take on Bollywood and its notorious casting couches. I have a severe dislike of the portrayal of women as being forced into it. For me, rape and consensual sex even on the pretext of giving you lifetime of fortune are two different things. I do not belong to the category of antiquated pre- marital sex phobic generation but I just do not agree with women being portrayed as helpless creatures despite “choosing” to be a part of the act.

                   

                                                                           

The next monologue " Ideas" is about a housewife and her condescending husband. It touched upon the issue of a kind of abuse neither punishable under the Indian law nor reported by any woman – Psychological abuse. Ishita Arun plays a housewife who tries different business ventures but in vain. Her husband doesn’t leave a single opportunity to remind her of her failures.  As the story unfolds one realizes that it isn’t professional success she is looking for. It is her husband’s acceptance as an individual she seeks to attain. I think the housewife represented every woman today. After all, aren’t we all trying to seek acceptance by trying to be that great looker cum career oriented cum home maker of a combination. And those criteria form an AND gate for us women. We default on one parameter and our lives refuse to function. We as women keep spinning this never ending guilt web, not just for us but other women too.

                                               

                                                                         

The next story " Seven Tiles" came as a breather amidst the mundane-ness . It touched a very sensitive topic of child molestation and was dealt with sensitivity. Viraf Patel portrayed the character with grace and subtlety.

                                     

The fourth monologue "Wonderland" is about a journalist played by Devika Shahani Punjabi. She represents the herd of mindless, sensational news reporters. Her conscience wakes up one day when she is stuck on a deserted road and asks for help from a passing car, just to realize this may be the biggest mistake of her life. It strikes her how a split second that can change someone’s life is merely fodder for tabloid journalism. Conscience strikes and she vows to uphold the ethics and morals on which the foundation of journalism was laid. Five years back, this story would have been a revelation but to stage something which is widely ridiculed in our society today without an iota of extra punch seemed futile to me. Some may argue that it depicted the life at the receiving end, but if you are into senseless journalism and it takes a nearly fatal encounter to wake you up to reality and become the torch bearers of the profession, then we all need to be really worried about the appalling state of affairs in this country.

                                                               

Darshan Jariwala’s portrayal of Mumbai's Man Friday in No Tension is like a breath of fresh air in this run of the mill play. He plays a loud and ostentatious agent who wears his flamboyance unabashedly on his sleeves. He has a wife in Versova and a mistress in Borivali. A rags to riches story, Gidwani believes he has earned the right to keep both of them. His rhetoric are hysterical. The man who takes bribes for a living, takes the aam admi way to get a visa to appease his “honest” mistress. Though the script is banal, it’s the execution that sets it apart.  

                                                                

Then there is this story " US Visa" about a Gujarati boy wanting to migrate to the USA. Another cliche. Well, not. Amidst his great American dreams, the Patel boy talks about his escapades during the Garba nights. It’s that time of the year when young girls and boys have fun on the pretext of going dancing. An unwritten ritual these days. There is another unwritten rule for this period- You don’t marry the girl who indulges in a physical relationship with you during this time. Why? Simply because women who succumb to their sexual desires are low on morals. This is when this very ordinary boy turns into a super hero for me. Simply because he refuses to understand how the rules apply differently for men and women. He fails to comprehend how a woman you could make love to one day becomes an object of despise the very next day. I hope one day this society would take a page out of this young Gujju boy's book and stops using a woman’s libido as a yardstick to approve of her very existence in this world.

                               

The next story "Relationship Status" is about a single mother and the daily battles she fights every day. It is about her "blasphemous" desire for companionship. It is about the solace she finds only in the anonymity of chat rooms. It is about men who are liberal enough to accept a divorced woman but shudder at the very mention of her offspring. It is about realizing that to be good mother a woman does not need to forgo her desire for a man’s love. It is about understanding that sacrifice is not a mother’s obligation and martyrdom is sacrosanct only in battle fields.

                                                                      

Zafar’s The Uprising is about Mumbai of the 22nd century. An era where we can erase our emotions just with a tap on a chip fitted into our necks. A time when oxygen will be the pseudo currency. It seemed like a 5^th grade students essay on pollution and its detrimental effects in the future. Absolutely disappointing. 

I have seen quite a few Mumbai themed plays by now and quite peculiarly all of them have a sad undertone to them. It makes we wonder are people in this city actually so depressed with their lives or is it just that sadness appeals more to the human mind than happiness these days?

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