After 12 Years

Here comes yet another post which wasn’t what I wanted to write when I started. As for the murder mystery of the previous post, it would remain unsolved as even with whatever little knowledge they had, no one from my neighbourhood was willing to testify before the police though it was a funny scene seeing all those aunties heading off to the police station for the first time when summoned by the SHO in scope of clues. The victim maintained a low profile which came to the rescue of the killers as no one bothered about who came to visit her. I had a healthy interaction with the 'post graduate' Head Constable Sita Ram who surprisingly knew what NSIT stood for and discussed with me the various leads which unfortunately weren't leading anywhere. I was naive enough to think of giving a police statement though it couldn't have been of any value addition to the case but the untimely entrance of my father and his stories of how X, Y, Z got entrapped in such cases and were turned into suspects by the police made me change my mind. Personally, I feel that we should have more faith in the Police because they can't prove anything without our help and its our responsibility also to get people justice.

Taking the clock back 2 years, with college starting, came the idea of dabbling into all those things which were avoided in school time. Dramatics was one of them. At the intra college fest Resonanz 2007, I volunteered to be a part of the COE team for Rangmanch, the drama competition (not too sure of the name). My horrendously written saas bahu script which was full of double meaning jokes was rejected and we were given a new one. Thankfully enough people turned up for it, including 2 girls otherwise some one amongst us would have had to undergo the metamorphism into a girl using the techniques shown in movies like Style, Aunty No.1 etc.

All this started just the day before the play. The last time I had been a part of a play was in class 1, with the role of a wood cutter who is stopped from cutting a tree by an angel (my first crush). So this next opportunity which came after 12 years promised something special. Neither of us knew any one by then and we also let that day go by with none apart from me having the complete script (as if that mattered as I too read it completely for the first time the next day in the metro only). So the next day, we started practicing and I soon realized that not me only, but all of us were rookies. The seniors were nowhere to be seen until the time the competition started and they realized what a mess we would make so the only help we got from them was that our slot was shifted so as to give us more time but that too flew by very quickly.

We knew that the hooting from the crowd would be incessant and unsurprisingly, it started from someone in the first row even before the play started.

Things started off on a decent note but it all got mixed up at the time of the scene change. My role was of someone who is unperturbed by what goes around him and the play was to revolve around the servant played by my friend Manish Malik who had to show more emotions ( he must have called me Malik (Boss) atleast a dozen times in the play). His costume was a baniyan (calling it a vest would take away the fun) and shorts. I would rather kill myself than commit to such a role. My anger over him is over the sky right now as today he gave me 4 horrible movies which in total I couldn’t tolerate for 1 hour. Coming back to the play, at one juncture, he had to usher in the next character and as the hooting reached its optimum level of ‘ek do teen char band karo ye atyaachar’, I frantically searched for him on the stage and was horrified on seeing him read the script in one corner of the stage. In panic mode we drifted way off the script never to come back. Thankfully everyone on the stage realized this and didn’t come upto me to tell me that this wasn’t a part of the script. To make things better I bought a more aggressive tone to my character but to no avail. The last blunder I did was to cry more than the person who came to me with the news of his grandfather’s death. So this is how we wrapped up a 15 min script in 5 minutes.

Thanks to inflation, no one can afford to hurl down tomatoes/eggs these days otherwise we would have collected enough for a month’s ration. The audience loved to hate it. Even students from our branch were against us and I feel they were fully justified in doing so. A couple of them came up to me later to tell me that thanks to us, none of them could now say with pride that they are from COE branch. But, we still stood 4^th out of 6 teams. Imagine the performance of those behind us. When we reached backstage, the blame game started with everybody blaming everybody else for the fiasco. The performance was so bad that even KRK would have felt proud of us. But still we had tried and made up with whatever time we had to make this possible though we always had the option of backing out. It didn’t really hurt much cause there were other factors to blame (no help from seniors, less time, weak script; always finding someone to blame for their own fault is an essential part of the Indian genome).

Inspite of all this, it is a happy memory for me though I would rather watch Rakhi/Rahul/Chunnu/Pappu ka Swayamwaar than do this again.

PJ:
Give me some sunshine, give me some rain…. I wanna grow up once again.

This song from 3 idiots is pretty good but it seems as if the lyricist’s growth hormones are stimulated through Photosynthesis. He forgot to add carbon dioxide though it is not his fault as it is available in plenty these days and the Copenhagen summit doesn’t seem to hold much promise for the future with the developed nations hiding under the veil of the now over recession to avoid making emission cuts.