Just a reality byte
ROMESH CHANDER
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Jyoti Narayan Nath's "www.assam.com" was staged this past week at National School of Drama as a homage to Tapas Sen.
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Last Monday started yet another theatre festival in the Capital. This time by the Association of National School of Drama Alumni (ANSDA) dedicated to the memory of Tapas Sen, the lighting wizard, who died this year.
Talking about the objectives of the festival M.K. Raina, president of ANSDA says, "The festival has been conceived to provide a performance platform to graduates of the National School of Drama, particularly those who are working in their own socio-cultural milieu and in their own language but find few opportunities to present their work before wider audiences. Raian goes on to say, "The demands, the challenges and indeed, the constraints that theatre professionals face in producing plays and then in finding the performance spaces and audiences, are not adequately understood or appreciated. Nor is the contribution that theatre can make in shaping contemporary Indian society, given much thought to. ANSDA will endeavour to provide a regular performance space, celebrate the work of the NSD alumni and also the values that we all share."
Selection process
V.K., the secretary of ANSDA told how the plays are selected. A committee with Ram Gopal Bajaj as the chairman, was set up that wrote to all former students of NSD inviting them to send their proposals if they wished to participate in the festival. Thirty people applied out of which the committee selected eight plays for the festival.
The festival opened with Jyoti Narayan Nath's "www.assam.com" who also designed and directed the play presented by Anubhav from Assam.
As the title indicates the play is built around an information website telling visitors about Assam and its physical and cultural heritage. One day, the website is struck by an unidentified virus and a completely different picture of Assam appears on the website; the plight of the victims of floods, an annual feature in Assam, and the exploitation of this disaster by unscrupulous people; a happy Assamese village, faced with the aggression of consumerism; the Bihu, the enchanting celebration of youth as against the mindless fashion shows.
Needless to say along all this the website shows us the mindset that persecutes women as also the society in which the post of constables is sold by Government officials; the desire of the middle class to send their children to elitist schools etc., even if the superstitious mindset persists in presenting women as inferiors and sometimes even branding them as witches; increasing unemployment and the selling of constable's jobs by Government servants, goes on.
Real Assam
The play apart from presenting the beauty and culture of Assam countryside is an honest presentation of socio-political scene not only in Assam but also in many other parts of the country.
And as the playwright-director says, "It is a well planned game being played to shatter our very identity and indeed existence, and the name of the game is terrorism often sponsored by the Government and other vested interests."
Thank you very much the cast, the music director and Jyoti Narayan Nath for giving us such a meaningful presentation that we are only too willing to overlook some of the minor slips here and there.
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