12 days and still writing!!!

Helllooo,
Today is the 28th.
Epilogue opens on the 9th.
And I'm still writing.
And we're all laughing hysterically on an ongoing basis at rehearsal. And not necessarily in the appropriate places.
It's mad. But lovely.
What news of everyone else?

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Party hard, rock on!

Have a great 2007!

thoughts

The very impulse to write, I think, springs from an inner chaos crying for order, for meaning, and that meaning must be discovered in the process of writing or the work lies dead as it is finished. To speak, therefore, of a play as though it were the objective work of a propogandist is an almost biological kind of nonsense, provided, of course, that it is a play, which is to say a work of art.
- Arthur Miller

Does this account for works that get caught up in their own ideological stances? If you are writing from a committed position, pretty much everything is geared towards the advancement of the agenda... what then is the condition of the aesthetic? Or is this when we slide some plays into the 'social' or 'issue based' category?

And another question - have we retreated into a personal shell? Do we write with myopia because we are confident only of our own representational stance, and eschew ownership of public conscience? How do you react to criticism that slots you into a 'self-absorbed urban angst' category?

27TH DECEMBER - - - !!!

when you playwrights are thrown to the media, with or without pancake, in that float called bombay, i will be happily settling down with my 7-kg heavy saree. hee hee. much fun than a press con where the best you would get might be a mushroom quiche. bleh. while i would be showered with gold and diamond and crispy dough, you peeps would just have to contend with those 5-min tableau. no?

meet me in jan, people, and tell me how good my mehendi looks on my delicate writer's hands. heh.

GRAAARRRH!!!

Just sent everyone invites to the blog. AGAIN!
Some ids have gone missing ... So...

Just remember to sign in with gmail ids and not the old ones.

Grumble grumble mumble...

Admin

Hi...
Blogger.com has suggested a migration/upgrade of blogs towards gmail integration. I've upgraded our dashboard, so all team members will need to re-register themselves before posting any new comments. If you have a gmail account, there should be no problems in the transition. If you do not, then blogger will give you the option of creating one. Sorry for the hassle, but it will make managing the blog a little easier and give us some new features (apparently). Also, it will be one less password to remember since you can just sign into blogger using your gmail username and password. :-)
Temporary anonymous posting has also been enabled, so in case you get locked out, let me know through the blog itself.
Thanks.

Ode To A Nightingale

THE TAO OF LOVE
- Maia Katrak


Love
is neither given
nor received

it is glimpsed
in the eyes
of the beloved.

Your heartbreak
is but an itch
in the side
of the Universe.

Love
is neither given
nor received

it is a glimpse
of the end
of the illusion

it is the calm
in the I
of the storm.

We know Emily Dickinson. Sylvia Plath. Sarojini Naidu. Kamala Das.
But do we know our Maia Katrak ?
Maia. Our Maia.
The talented and versatile Maia.
The beautiful and brilliant Maia.
The mysterious and enigmatic Maia.
Never mind if you don’t know Maia.
What’s more important?
The artist or her art? The poet or her song?
Don’t you just love the creative use of words in this particular Tao? The way
eye becomes the “I”. How anything to do with Maia becomes the I? Or sometimes Rustom.
But not Sohrab. Never Sohrab.
What I love about “The Tao of Love” is the Sufi philosophy of love “being neither given or received.”
What a literary gem!
Hence forth we would only be discussing Maia or her poems or Rustom in this blog.
I am sorry but that’s how it is going to be.

Vijay? We know a Vijay?

No really, Vijay who?

VIJAY WHO?

"Do you know Vijay Nair?"

I was out to lunch yesterday with the whole of the English Department of my university. Sitting next to a young man who joined the dept in September -- he is nice but we had never chatted socially before. I was telling him about India, and about Vasind, and what it was all about. Then he said, "Do you know Vijay Nair?". How much of a coincidence was that? Vijay may be guessing now -- yes, it was Steve Van Hagen, who was in Canterbury at the same time, I think. He said he had acted in one of Vijay's plays there. We then spent a happy few minutes telling each other how nice Vijay was, and he sent much love and good wishes.

Doh! Just got it...

I think I've had a small revelation. A lot of my feedback at the first workshop centered around allowing my writing to 'surprise' me. At the time, it seemed kinda dumb (as is often the case with good advice) ... and I couldn't make much of it.

How do you let your writing surprise you? Sneak up on yourself when you are asleep or writing and put ice down your back??? Strangely enough, at this point in time, I think this is probably how it's done.

This retrospective actually occurred to me as a result of a conversation I had last night with herr direktor. At some point I figured that the single atomic unit of the play is a single action ... an activity that is carried out by one entity on another... and this atomic action is electric with possibilities. Man looks at skull - on screen, or in performance, is pretty solidified, but Man looks at skull - on the page is an entire world of possibility.

Is this the terror of it all - the surprise - the 'possibility'? The single line on the page that seems perfectly stable to you, ends up as something totally different in the director's mind and a third in the actors, and another in every member of the audience... I think that's terrifying! Not because 'that's not what i meant' or 'this is my interpretation' ... but because the text is a bundle of atomic units carefully assembled by the writer, and god knows what lurks in there - and the rush of it all, is in the release of the dormant nuclear power!

Significant time is spent in rehearsal in the 'exploration' of texts. And that is an exciting time for directors and actors! And when you think about it, all the time spent writing has also been an exploration - the struggle to fixate ideas onto paper. And here I make a jump - an actor trains in an effort to 'create the moment' - and some of the most dazzling moments are those born of absolute spontaniety... If an actor can train to receive this instant, much the same can be said of the writer...

Beyond the burden of words, beyond the problems of text - in the act of writing itself - is the unimaginably staggering world of possibility... the terror of the blank page, the horror of staring down at places in yourself and seeing characters shimmer into existence, the shearing agony of knowing where the play is going and not knowing at all how to get there, the 'stomach burn' of being hit sideways by ideas at 3am when you've passed out on your keyboard... waking up in unknown territory ...

You 'surprise yourself' by walking out of the world of 'round, flat, real, type' characters and action - and into the realm of the silhouette...

heh heh heh

this is just too funny... you have GOT to hear this..

http://howtoprankatelemarketer.ytmnd.com/

i still can't stop laughing...

Theatre and history lessons

Guess this post is more for Vijay than anyone else! Been having a whirlwind week but decided that come what may I would catch something at the Prithvi festival. Managed to catch a couple of plays, both by, er, an extremely erudite gentleman. Erudite, no doubt, (and I'm not being sarcy) and he made sure the audience knew that. The show started almost half an hour late, and I was beginning to panic because the schedule was really tight and we had a performance scheduled in exactly two and a half hours. But after one hour of a history lesson (taught by a very sleepy and long-winded teacher) called Mahadevbhai, I frankly didn't feel terrible about having to walk out during the intermission. Went with a lot of apprehensions to see today's Cotton-Polyester show. It was better, but frankly not quite the zinger, and I could clearly see the director's inputs shining through.
The one thing shining through is a lack of energy in the scripts. There's no zing, you know? Cotton-polyester holds you because of the fine actors in the cast. Kumud Mishra, was, I thought, really good, as was the actor who played Bhausaheb, and they were well-supported by the rest of the cast. which is not to say that Jaimini Pathak was not good, but the script was soooooo boring!
This has made me really apprehensive. This guy is supposed to be one of the more successful playwrights around, isn't he? And quite clearly knows it! I hope I don't end up completely miscalculating the way the play is supposed to come across to an audience, and end up dependent on a great cast to pull through my script, 'cause I may not get that.
Oh god, do I sound uptight! But how I wish we had the luxury of a private showing with the harshest audience, like that play-in-making concept we read here some time back...I am so totally dreading the January onslaught. Give us honest reviews, You up there...and better make them good ones!

(PS: Am coming over to Bombay on the 6th for a couple of days to meet my team. Who's around in the city at that time? Let's catch up!)

Again, and again

Somebody stop me!

This time, it was twenty metres away. Claymore, they later told us. The shrapnel opens a small toothy grin in the window above my head (oh, did I mention they were shatter-proof?)

Then, the firing. Yell at my team to get away from the windows. Just get the hell back into the corridor. AK-56 assault rifles, a few together, sound like the movies tell you they're supposed to. The firing stops. I risk a peek from behind a pillar. The target steps out, gets into a less damaged car, and zips away. It's been all of a few seconds.

They pick up the pellets, from the floor, from inside someone's car. Little round things, thrown around by the Claymore.

Some pellets not so lucky. Embedded into a skull here, a heart there. Their journey has come full circle.

Looking forward to idyllic and tranquil Bombay next week.

Whoo hoo!

Hullo!
We having a general dinner meet up kind of thing on Monday night, the 4th of Dec.
Get your bums to Soul Fry (Pali Naka, Bandra) for Karaoke night at 8pm.
Tell all tell all! Bring party hats and tooters.
Wheee...