Comedian Azeem Banatwalla talks about the changing scene of stand-up in the country and his need to constantly reinvent himself

He’s been described as an ‘effortlessly likeable’ comedian, someone whose speciality is ‘merciless humour’. But at Azeem Banatwalla’s recent performance in Chennai, he struggled to find his footing. “It took me a while to get the audience warmed up. As a performer, I take some time to set up my jokes; that could be a reason. However, we settled in soon enough, and things were smooth from there,” he says.

He insists that his brand of humour is different from that of other Indian stand-up artistes. “My acts are all about things that appeal to me. I analyse religion without being offensive, and I absolutely don’t do political humour or over-the-top adult humour. I am more quirky in my approach with these topics; even when I touch upon religion, it is with tact. At the risk of sounding pompous, I’d say I’m into intelligent humour,” he laughs.

With the audience across the country evolving, keeping content fresh is a challenge for stand-up artistes, says Azeem. “The audience in places like Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata are good at picking up subtle humour, and they no longer shy away from calling out an artiste, if he or she is off the mark. If your material is stereotypical, you can expect to be booed,” he says, adding, “People are more well-read today. So we don’t just pander to the crowd anymore; we talk about things that we want. And I like this challenge of having to constantly reinvent my humour because, after a point, I get bored telling the same jokes over and over again.”

The 6-footer, who spent the initial part of his career writing for various publications, confesses that his acts were written like staid scripts. “I realised I was delivering the same lines in the same way, over and over again. That is no longer the case. I now just prepare a rough draft of points I want to touch upon during an act, and then go on to improvise my jokes based on how the audience receives them,” he says.

His stories stemming from frequent travels and his observation about life in general usually translate to humour on-stage. “It could be my take on the air hostesses or the crying babies around me,” says Azeem, who himself enjoys watching comedians like Bill Burr, Sundeep Rao and Anuvab Pal.

But the man, who manages to rack up laughs and guffaws throughout his acts, is quite reticent when he’s away from the spotlight. “I think I’m the most confident when I’m on stage. When I’m off it, I’d much rather sit in a corner, finish my drink and go home,” he laughs.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> MetroPlus /  by Ranjani Rajendra / September 05th, 2015

A tantalising novel pits art against new India

The Cosmopolitans | Anjum Hasan | Hamish Hamilton | Pages 275 | Rs 499

The title of Anjum Hasan’s newest book sets the tone for a novel chock-full of irony. In fact, the first word of the book is also a title and an exercise in irony. ‘Nostalgia was big,’ the book begins. Nostalgia is the art installation that appears in the very first chapter of the book. A living room with a vintage TV playing black-and-white news about death in jungles and government scams, the installation has travelled from Venice to Bangalore. Which is where Qayenaat, the protagonist of this tantalising novel about art and artists, encounters its strange, retro glamour.

The tension between provincials and cosmopolitans is a well-examined theme in Hasan’s work. Her first novel, Lunatic in My Head (2007), was set in Shillong and traced the lives of three characters waiting for their life to begin. Hasan has also published a collection of poems, a second novel,Neti, Neti: Not This, Not This (2009) as well as a collection of short stories, titled Difficult Pleasures (2012), a title that could very well apply to all her writing. In her current novel, the title is like a lightbulb in a living room, invisible in itself, but illuminating everything under it.

What’s in a title? Qayenaat is, after all, a woman who has bought a painting by the mysterious artist called NJ because of its ‘poignant, Shakespearean name’. As for her own name: ‘At twenty she had dropped her last name simply because it was Gupta and there was no way to reconcile the ordinariness of Gupta with the sublimity of Qayenaat. So, braving passport officials and census takers, strangers on trains who insisted she reveal her religion, caste and clan, and boyfriends who wanted to know her second name before they kissed her, she stuck to Qayenaat…’

And thus we have our unusual protagonist. A 53-year-old single woman and a failed artist, prone to wearing ‘corduroys the colour of horse shit and khadi the colour of dishwater’, assertive enough to shake off her surname, but willing to be perplexed about art, about whether galleries matter, about artists and their public responsibilities. But while Qayenaat has been busy preserving the dignity of a genteel, reflective life, ‘Something had been happening since the turn of the century to render everyone well-off except Qayenaat.’

Hassan’s precise, poetic voice soars when she describes the new wealth of Bangalore: ‘It was as if they’d all just been waiting for Pears soap and Italian pasta to hit the shelves before they disowned their alleged poverty, grinning sheepishly as they abandoned the swadeshi delights of their youth—the polka-dotted nylon saris, the low-roofed Fiat cars, the striped yellow packs of glucose biscuits, the synthetic orange juices, the bottles of royal blue Chelpark ink with which one filled fountain pens to write letters to faraway friends and which friends filled their pens with to write back.’

Hasan’s observation of the city is always scrupulous and affectionate, and a joy to read. With detail that is both deft and luxuriant, she describes the busy hunger on the streets of Shivajinagar during the Iftar hour, the women inburkhas and running shoes doing their rounds in Coles Park, how MG Road’s dream of being the modern centre of the city was interrupted by the malls and lifestyle enclaves and bistros of more nouveau riche neighbourhoods. Bangalore and the various ideals of cosmopolitanism it stands for are transmuted into a particularly suitable setting in this book about various species of cosmopolitans.

At first glance, Baban, the jet-setting artist, and Sara, the wealthy art collector, are the cosmopolitans of the novel, with their casual, easy relationship to money and art. Qayenaat, like MG Road, has been out-cosmoplitaned over the years. Then there is her former lover Sathi, a journalist from the boondocks of Uttar Pradesh. Sathi lives by Mahatma Gandhi’s dictum about asking yourself how one’s actions will affect the poorest. This makes him both pragmatic and idealistic. When Sara and Baban are discussing Baban’s newest idea for an installation: a mansion of water, ‘a liquid monument,’ it is Sathi who brings up the pathetic condition of municipal waterworks. Water, like money, is an object of abstraction for Baban and Sara, whereas for Sathi, and Qayenaat, living in Sir MV Nagar, an industrial township beyond the northern edge of the city, water and money are in short supply.

It is refreshing to read a book about a woman who needs money. When we first meet Qayenaat in the gallery, she is there because she is, she realises belatedly, in love with the artist Baban, the old friend who has reinvented himself as a world-famous artist, newly returned to the city of his youth. But before the story can settle into the expected romantic momentum, money or the lack of it becomes a central element in the narrative. Qayenaat needs money, and with Sathi’s help, briefly considers staging an art theft to con the insurance people. After she becomes responsible for the tragic death of a beloved art critic, Qayenaat abandons Bangalore. To do this, she has to raise money and she does so by selling her beloved The Painting of a Sorrow. But where can she go to make amends? The answer is provided by an old cutting from The Illustrated Weekly about a dying dance form, saved amongst her father’s memorabilia. ‘I’ll go into India,’ Qayenaat decides.

However, this external world of art openings and conversations and thought crimes and tragic deaths only exist as a backdrop, however, for Hasan’s meticulous exploration of her character’s inner life. Right from the beginning, the reader is stationed inside Qayenaat’s head. The story alternates between the languid pace of her rambling thoughts and the occasional spurt of action. Even the dance she is passionate about exploring is a means to an end in this philosophical novel; in terms of popular appeal and glamour, this art form created by the rulers of an erstwhile kingdom in central India is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Baban’s Nostalgia. Determined to study the dance, Qayenaat arrives in Simhal, a tiny town in the middle of the country whose tribals are at war with the Indian state—the kind of place that produces the bad news which the TV newscaster in Baban’s living room installation is mouthing.

Legend (or excellent public relations) has it that Orhan Pamuk was inspired to start collecting objects for his Museum of Innocence after meeting a former Ottoman royal who made a living as a ticket collector in an Egyptian palace. Apparently, the Crown Prince even considered taking up a tour guide position at the Ihlamur Palace, in Istanbul where he had grown up. In Simhal, Qayenaat, too, meets a monarch whose vocation has devolved into an all-consuming nostalgia, in a ruined palace whose red paint has faded to the colour of mud, stuffed with ‘racks of mouldy dance costumes and chests of rusty swords’.

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The king of this palace dreams of ‘a museum and a library dedicated to the dance; a five-star hotel that could house at least two hundred guests; and, finally, a university to teach performance arts to students from every corner of the world’. But there is already a museum of innocence in Simhal: a dusty, forgotten archive of legless statues, complete with a library where a young woman sits reading in the newspaper about landmines blowing up buses in the countryside near them. Here, Qayenaat makes a friend.

In another ruined building, she falls in love. Watching this, far away from the chaos and discontents of Bangalore, is one of the pleasures of this novel. The hope and lightness of love are weighed, again and again, against the larger world, full of violence and instability; Hasan is especially adept at this eternal conflict. What eventually saves Qayenaat, however, is not love, but friendship. The loyalty of Sathi, the generosity of Sara, the shy sisterhood that springs up between Qayenaat and the young librarian— eventually, it is friendship that saves Qayenaat and redeems her journey when the king betrays her ideals and his tiny sphere of influence turns into a gilded cage.

The Cosmopolitans begins with an art exhibition and ends in an art exhibition. NJ has been killed by those who are offended by the nudity in her paintings, and in honour of her, Baban is curating an exhibition of paintings by Bangalore artists. As the novel ends, Qayenaat walks through the gallery wondering:

‘Do they display resistance, these works that mourn and celebrate NJ, or have they just been produced to be consumed by the always open maw of that monster, the market? She did not know but felt at home as she walked among them. Here again was déjà vu all over again. Art, which was long in contrast to life’s shortness. Art, which she had been a student of all her adult life, burnt down one evening, left Bangalore to get away from, found in another form in Simhal, and then escaped yet again to return to where she’d started. Art, which had killed NJ and was perhaps the only thing that could avenge her death, bring her back to life in some small way.’

A book that began with nostalgia ends with déjà vu. Perhaps this is the difference between the cosmopolitans and the provincials. One is destined to long for the thing that is gone, and the other is sentenced to the banality of repetition. The Cosmopolitans is a lyrical study in how one feeds off of the other.

(Shahnaz Habib is a writer and editor)

source: http://www.openthemagazine.com / Open / Home> Books /  by Shahnaz Habib / August 07th, 2015

Vikram Sampath is on cloud nine.

His book, My Name Is Gauhar Jaan, is being scripted into a play by none other than Mahesh Dattani.

And it will be directed by Lillete Dubey.

Currently, the two men have been discussing the period drama and the classical background score to go with it.

The play, Gauhar, is likely to be staged at the end of the year and will have a worldwide premier. Although the play is inspired by the book, Sampath is happy to allow “dramatic liberties”.

But knowing Dattani, a stickler for details and accuracy, there ain’t going to be any heartburn. As of now, if wishes were horses, Sampath would love to showcase the play at the Bangalore Lit Fest. The diarist would like that too.

source : http://www.bangaloremirror.com / Bangalore Mirror / Home> Columns> Code 560 / Bangalore Mirror Bureau / September 02nd, 2015

On the 92nd birth anniversary of the man the likes of whom are hardly around in Indian theatre any more.  by  Danish Husain

I have a habit of reaching places late. I got to work with Habib Tanvir only in the last 5 years of his life. And this has been one of my big regrets; I often wish my association with him had started earlier. I would have learnt more—about theatre, arts, culture and even life. His death deprived me of all this.

He was perpetually on the lookout for new faces. I was working with M.S. Sathyu in Dara Shikoh when a fellow actor Humayun Abbasi, a family acquaintance of Habib Saab, introduced me to him. I eventually got to work with him in Agra Bazaar. But my first meeting with him was much earlier as a manager in the Standard Chartered Bank. He was standing in the queue at the counter one day when I spotted him. Of course I recognised him, immediately pulled him out of the queue, escorted him to my desk, and sorted out his queries. Later when I narrated the incident to him, he remembered it. Since 2004-05, I became a regular member of the Agra Bazaar troupe.

The most amazing thing about Habib Saab was that he had multiple backup plans for any situation. He would never be perturbed by any news, however problematic. Even 10 minutes before a show, if there were last minute changes to be made, he would calmly go about making them. He could chop and edit a play at a minute’s notice and yet it would come together as a whole, complete in itself. The show wouldn’t stop ever. He would improvise as and when required.

At times his plays had 45-50 actors on stage, a pan-India cast with actors travelling from all over the country. They could be a logistical nightmare, but not for him. He would have multiple actors work on multiple roles so anybody could take over from anyone else in case of an emergency. He would call me “stepney”. “Jahan chaahe laga do” he would say. So I played many big and small roles—shayar, shohda, patangwala, even a crowd member in Agra Bazaar.

He had an eye on everything, every aspect of the play, from lighting to music to costumes, props, sets, you name it. He had an eye for detail. There was a sense of rootedness in his works. The texts were anchored in a defined sensibility, culture, ethos and zubaan. His understanding of his material was immaculate. The enormity and nuance of it would sink only after multiple performances. Bahut badaa mayajaal tha unka but you would understand the big picture when you figured out how the smallest of the components operated.

Each of his plays had this layering and subtlety which hit you and stayed with you much after you had watched the play. The play demanded to be seen again and again. One had to revisit it to absorb and savour it. Each time you viewed a specific play a new window of meaning opened on you.

He had once referred to himself as a “benign dictator”. I remember hearing that in one of the documentaries made on him. He never wielded a hammer during rehearsals. He would sit with a pipe in a corner and intervene only when someone went off tune. He had this ambivalent relationship with the Chattisgarhi actors. They were idiosyncratic and difficult to handle. In fact, the character of policewala in Charandas Chor was Habib Saab himself, metaphorically, constantly chasing and steering his actors. It was about his own struggles as a director. The actors, on the other hand, would have problems with him yet could not live without him. He could steer and keep the herd together because he had a fine understanding of human nature. The actors would often get drunk and riled up post performance and would misbehave with him but he would just sit calmly and hear them out. Next day, when the hullabaloo would be over, the actors would tremble, wait for a reaction from him. But he wouldn’t react, he’d be silent and use it effectively. It intrigued and worried them and they would come around. He managed to take them all along. They would fight, leave and come back. But things kept moving. They wouldn’t halt. No wonder then why there were instances of three generations of actors working with Naya Theatre.

His grounding, thoughts and understanding are missing now. Naya Theatre was self funded through invited shows. The grants were not very huge. One hears that the land allotted to him for the repertory also got usurped. Yet he kept Naya Theatre going for 50 years, it has survived six years after he is gone. If things are not seeming bright it’s also because of the government’s failure to recognise true artistes and what fosters a culture. He was a true visionary, a one in a century kind of man, the likes of whom are hardly around in Indian theatre any more.

source : http://www.outlookindia.com / Outook / Home> Arts & Entertainment – Opinion / by Danish Husain / September 01st, 2015