The Mystery of Martand Haveli

After hearing great reviews last year about Crazy Spotlight Productions’ One Night only, I decided I would be foolish not to see this year’s production, viz., The Mystery of Martand Haveli. The play was staged at Sri Ram Centre and the hall was packed. The actors were good as was the set design. What was missing was the compactness of a mystery. It seemed loose at places and attention dithered. But humour there was plenty. What struck was Shehnaaz, the eccentric detective taking the cake with her Punjabi accented English and the full on use of sexual innuendoes. Kamini and Damini, the detective twins synchronized their movements wonderfully. All the actors were quite competent. As a director, Nikhil has done a good job, though this genre is unchartered territory for him as yet.
Kudos to these talents who have made theatre their passion!

Adhe Adhure

On 31st July I saw a play – Mohan Rakesh’s Adhe Adhure. I had heard about this play earlier but what got me interested was the ensemble cast. With Lilette Dubey directing and acting with Mohan Agashe as co-actor was simply too much to resist. This 105 minute play in two acts was engrossing. The storyline in today’s context was nothing unusual, though set in 1969, it was. A dissatisfied woman who tries to get her house in order, an unhappy man, three children grappling with themselves and their surroundings, a home bursting at the seams with dissonance… So who comes out the winner?? No one. The lady tries to break away, to make a happy life for herself and fails. The men in her life somehow never come forward to support her. Her children are cocooned in their stories. The man of the house utterly depressed, leaves the house to be with a friend but cannot remain away for long. Life continues…half lived.
Mohan Agashe’s portrayal of four men in the play was a winner and he did it with all the honesty of an actor. Lilette stated at the end of the play (while taking the bow) that she had promised herself when she first saw this play while in college, that Adhe Adhure would be her first play directed in Hindi and at Delhi. Well, she did a good job of it. Congratulations!!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Parts I & II

Finally, the end. Something I had dreaded when the books came out and dreaded once again when the movies came. And all because I’m a Harry Potter fan – big time! The last two parts of the Harry Potter movie saga and the last book were the most bleak and dark and weighed heavily through the screening and the read. Perhaps that’s the reason the after death experience with Harry seemed so out of place – it was so white! But director David Yates has handled the imaginary world so beautifully that it was easy to have my imagination fusing with that of the director’s. Sadly, one has to take the restrictions of a movie into account and that is where movies have always fallen short of the books.
Now the question is, do we live on without another session at Hogwarts or is JK Rowling already yielding the quill and filling up reams with another magical journey? I so hope it’s the latter!

Goodbye Forever

An English play by Feisal Alkazi. It has two acts and is 105 mins long. I went to see because it was directed by Alkazi. Now this play had members of the Alkazi family involved in prominent roles. And yes, all are capable actors.
So your loved one dies suddenly. You are yet to come to grips with this loss when suddenly she returns!! How do you deal with it? The husband is the happiest person, greeting his wife with love and prohibiting her to leave again. The son, on the other hand, reacts differently. He knows she is a ghost and cannot stay. The mother- in- law played ably by Sohaila Kapur hits the nail on the head when she tells the family that this situation was not right. Anyway, she was not very fond of Estelle either as her husband was quite smitten by his daughter in law.
Estelle was in the middle of rearranging her house furniture when she died. So she comes back to complete the task and while she is at it, she manages to reconcile the family to her death. In fact, the play ends with the husband offering to drive her back to the graveyard and the young son breaks down for the first time since her death.
Alkazi describes the play beautifully - About loving and leaving... of laughter and forgetting.
Letting go is what the play is all about.

Learning to appreciate Western Classical Music

Do you think a 2-day workshop of four hours on Appreciating Western Classical music is enough? Well I do not. Nevertheless, I enrolled and Sunit Tandon did his best to do justice to the topic. It was an introduction no doubt, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I've found that my favourite composers are from the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods. When I mention some of them, you'll know why. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Strauss all belong within these periods. Their music simply opens up another dimension of the mind from which I'm loathe to return. Music can simply feed your soul and make you expand beyond known dimensions. See, its turned me into a poet and it'll do the same for you!!!

Glimpses of the Beauty of Kashmir

Kashmir

The seven days I got to spend in Kashmir were heavenly, to say the least. I attended a two-day seminar on Human Rights in Kashmir organized by the Army (what does this say?) at Srinagar. It was a well thought out program with learned panelists interacting with a very active audience, which besides the men in olive green also had students and teachers from the Kashmir University. The panelists included Sadia Dehlvi, Dr Manoj Joshi, Cok Ajay Shukla (Retd), Farooque Andrabi, Dr Riyaz Punjabi, Dr SM Sahai (IG Police), Prof Siddiq Wahid, Justice BC Patel, Gen Patankar (Retd), Dilafroz Qazi,and others, none any less. They put forward their views and took questions graciously. All this has come about as an initiative taken by the army to bring about a change in the atmosphere prevailing in this State, and the change is perceptible. This paradise does not deserve to be mauled by self interested parties destroying the very fabric of Kashmiriyat.
The visit to the city showed up a vibrant place teeming with tourists and there was no trace of fear or tension in the area. I had my fill of qahva. The shikara ride on the Dal Lake brought back memories of my visit to this place 25 years ago. Of course there was no coffee joint like Coffea Arabia here back then, where I enjoyed the cold coffee and paneer shwarma along with the peppy ambience.
I then spent some time with my friends in Kupwara and what a way to connect with nature. The mountains green with pine trees, the swift flowing Lolab, the apple trees already full with tiny apples, the chinar trees, wild strawbwrry flowers encountered on our treks, the clear air and sky along with the lovely company - it was indescribable. Go visit Kashmir and you will know what I mean.