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.