Tendulkar was a legend

Vijay Tendulkar who expired few days back was an amazing man. I came to know about him only in 1997-1998, my awareness of theater was quite limited till then. In 1994 I recall I went for a play as part of temple festival, since the whole day’s program was sponsored by the family I decided to go. The play was not up to the mark- with painfully exaggerated dialogues and some actors missing the cue, in small towns of kerala people react quite viciously to substandard affair. They consider it as personal insult, so they started hooting and the play was abruptly stopped and was replaced by some song, in the meantime the younger crowd started to search some of us youngsters to teach a lesson and I recall hiding in darkness for an hour or so and running full speed home !!!. With this background I had very low opinion about theatre, and so mostly gave not much importance to plays. While I was in Delhi I stayed quite near to Mandi house, so once happen to see the notice of Mrichkatikum, just out of curiously I dropped in. It was brilliant and just couldn’t believe that theater could be so sophisticated. It so happened that this play was directed by legendary Habib Thanvir, it was amazing way to start. I was so much excited about it that next two years I didn’t miss a single play, seeing even the bad ones at basement of Sriram centre Theater (where once the play had to be stopped in between since they forgot the dialogues, it was an amateur group and there were some five odd people in the audience!). I tried to introduce few people whom I knew those days to theatre with not much success!!; I recall being very upset if good plays did not have much audience or the phone rang!!.

It was during these days that I came to know about Vijay Tendulkar, infact there was festival of Tendulkar play. I was blown over by Ghasiram kotwal, Sakharam binder (I was initially reluctant to go for these plays- not impressed by the title and having absolutely no idea about Tendulkar!!!), Kamala, Khamosh Adalat Jari hai and so on. All these plays I have watched many times performed by different troupes (even the original Marathi version on a tour in Pune!!) and so was able to appreciate the nuances. Tendulkar was raw, he touched reality the way that we understand subtleties of life often missed in the stampede and made us think. His understanding of life was deeper particularly the issues related to sexuality (compare this with on your face westernized market driven clichéd approach these days). His plays left some very deep impact on my thinking. Bloggers also will be aware that he scripted movies like Ardh Satya, Manthan and so on.

Ps. This brochure of Tendulkar play I saw in 2001 I found in a book the other day, probably used as a bookmark!!. Incidentally I had collected some 100 odd brochures of the plays I liked during those days unfortunately many I lost as my room got flooded in rain and cartons got destroyed in 1999.