Life ............ something more....

                                      

  There was a dialogue in the play yesterday that I had really liked... 

and I had thought I would remember .. but I feel a little unsure right now...

It is always the same story with me ... ...

remembering some bit ... forgetting others... 

and then trying  to reconstruct with chips from my abyss of forgetting !!

Amongst all others  that dialogue  from the play along with the visuals had impressed me most. That and the reminiscence of the characters on the "firsts of many others" have triggered in me an irrepressible replay of memories of yesterday...

Our first phone number : 261

The first car my dad owned : Ambassador - DLK 1973

My first friend in school : Rini Basu

My first prize : Alice in Wonderland

and many more firsts... of many others..

At the stake of sounding shallow I however admit that in spite of having lived in the India of 1983 and 1992, the communal riots have not left a very deep impression on me. They were merely headlines in "The Telegraph" -- the newspaper that my father used to read then. I however remember the agitation over the Mondol Commission during V. P. Singh's time and the noise raised by the "non SC-STs" over the reservation of seats latter. I guess it is the selfish -- self-indulgent slice of me that remembers the later and has conveniently forgotten the massacre of the former. I am embarrassed.... but that is me ...... the sum total of all my memories...... that define me... my life.

On googling I found that the play was a theatrical adaptation of "THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT." It was all about the memories that we choose to keep with ourselves, reclaiming which we believe  we can reconstruct us, and the loss of which will make the person in the mirror a stranger to us. Through the characters of Rajat (Rajat Kapoor), Sheeba (Sheeba Chadha), Vinay (Vinay Pathak), Munish (Munish Bharadwaj), Yoginder Chauhan (Ranbir Shorey) and the Doctor (Konkona Sen Sharma),  this underlying thought was brilliantly portrayed in the  play last evening --- THE BLUE MUG.


[photos 1,2 by  G. Pandey, photo 3 via google search ]