PratikBasu

There was a time when English theatre, much like its Bengali counterpart, thrived in Calcutta (as the city was then known) with groups like The Amateurs, SAD (an acronym for the Society of Amateur Dramatics), the Calcutta Players and Red Curtain, among several others, staging plays – Miller to Mamet, Pirandello to Pinter, Stoppard to Simon; from the relentless dramatic suspense of Albee’s Zoo Story to the fantastical, funny, farcical antics of the shockingly surprising characters of Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce – of consistently high standards that, if it were Pinter or Albee, demanded serious acting chops of the main protagonists (who, at most, numbered two or three) to hold a discerning audience in thrall for the better part of 90 minutes without support of elaborate set decorations or frequent lighting changes or, as in the case of Neil Simon and Alan Ayckbourn, impeccable comic timing from an ensemble cast to keep the action fast, free and furious without overwhelming the audience with the frenetic pace and improvisational style that usually accompanies such productions. That the acting was of such high standard was even more remarkable when one considered that the participants were mostly boxwallahs – not travelling salesmen, with large boxes of clothes and jewellery to peddle door-to-door, after whom the term originated, but mid-level executives of multinational firms that at the time I speak of prodigiously dotted Calcutta’s commercial landscape – who held time-consuming day jobs (albeit not of a particularly taxing nature) and had professional career objectives to fulfill but were prepared to sacrifice quality time with family and friends at the altar of English theatre, pursuing it with a passion that others of lesser thespian talent reserved for golf, except that rehearsals usually tended to aggregate more hours in the four months to opening day than did golf in an equivalent time frame.

At the risk of being facetious, I tend to think that the decline of English theatre started with the change in the city’s name from the colonial ‘Calcutta’ to the countrified ‘Kolkata,’ in January 2001, not, perhaps on the exact day that the renaming happened nor in one all-destroying tidal swoop but the germ of decay, almost certainly, was insidiously planted then, gathering momentum in the years thereafter, growing and spreading, like a raging Trojan virus, unchecked, unstoppable and unrelenting.

Inheriting an incomparable, unparalleled and highly unique legacy like the Great Bengal Renaissance (circa 1872 – 1941), it was no surprise that till the end of the last millennium Calcutta, as I prefer to remember it as, dominated the Indian cultural scene continuing to produce modern giants in the fields of literature, cinema, music, dance and drama with almost monotonous regularity and though their English counterparts, born out of arts borrowed and, at best, only passionate pastimes for those who pursued them, were never in the same league (except for Indian writing in English which, arguably, was of a gold standard), some of the excellence bubbling in the local cultural cauldron must have spilled over to English theatre as well because the plays were staged with exceptional stagecraft and professionalism, some of the more regular actors going on to achieve international acclaim, one, in particular, becoming the biggest movie star India’s ever known.

So, I wasn’t particularly surprised to find on my return to Calcutta after 20 years that the cultural pot was still simmering merrily although the sheer number of people painting, sculpting, dancing, singing, writing books, spouting poetry or staging plays – a veritable tsunami of creative excess and narcissism – should have served as fair warning (if only one had not been blinded by the nostalgia of homecoming) that with everything else in the city in spiraling decline, it was highly unlikely that a second Bengal renaissance was in the making. Any false impressions I might have had in that regard were put to rest with the finality of death when, after nimbly avoiding countless glossy invitations – via electronic mail and maddeningly repeated Facebook posts – to book launches, poetry readings, art and sculpture shows, Bangla-rock band concerts, dance drama recitals, paid movie premieres, et al, one succumbed, in a moment of regrettable weakness, to an invitation to a performance of Neil Simon’s “Tumours” that was billed as a laugh riot, enacted by a cast of Kolkata’s most promising thespians, all members of one of the city’s most prestigious clubs once known – in its long-gone salad days – for its exclusive membership (by invitation only), strict adherence to the snootiest of dress codes, Friday buffets, Chinese cuisine and the extensive library where many of the books – gifts from departing Englishmen returning home after furling the Union Jack – rivaled the median age of the Club’s members.

[To Be Continued]

Coming as I do from an Army background, my father a senior pathologist in the medical corps, I had my fair share of residential relocations growing up, each change of city meaning a change of educational institution and the tectonic shifts that went with it – making new friends, adapting to new teaching methods, playing catch-up on the syllabus (for no school is ever at the same level of progress as another, particularly half way through an academic year), managing the expectations of a new set of teachers and adjusting to the new set of foibles and idiosyncrasies they came with – though, truth be told, a doctor in the army, particularly one with the seniority my dad had when my schooling required me to be resident in one location for at least three years at a stretch, is much less booted about than his counterparts in, say, the armoured corps, artillery, infantry or border security forces where you can consider yourself lucky if you aren’t ordered to pack your bags and head for the next temporary home every eighteen months or so, with or without your family.

Despite the relative stability of my Alma Mater years (in physical terms if not mental), I find myself, without any discernible effort on my part, an unwitting (and, dare I say, reluctant?) member of four separate alumni associations. When you add to that the several organizations I have worked for in a career, checkered of sorts, spanning three decades that have robust and active “past employee” associations of their own, then, at any point of time, I am automatically subscribed to at least eight separate newsletter services, not to mention the Facebook pages and the Yahoo and Whatsapp chat groups that go with them.

With the instant access to one’s target audience that current technology provides, the narcissistic and exhibitionistic impulses it inflames and the subconscious creative urges it inveigles out of even the least right-brained individuals, I am frequently drowned in an unbridled, tsunami-like barrage of electronic mail, posts, texts and tweets from active alumni who, on the evidence of their activity on social media, have nothing better to do with their time than inhabit this virtual world and yearningly reminisce about the good old days.

To annotate their fading memories, they unearth monochrome photographs from long-forgotten albums of you looking 25 years younger (which you probably were when those photos were taken) or you, caught in an unguarded and (invariably) embarrassing moment looking like something you wouldn’t ever want to be reminded of let alone have flaunted publicly. Borrowed quotations, embellished with what are thought to be appropriate images in case one were to miss their deeper significance, are shared like a morning prayer as are meandering jokes that require one to scroll down endlessly to reach the punch lines, apparently to heighten their impact on senses that, by now, are likely to have been rendered numb by the preceding plethora of texts, notifications and illustrated annotations. To exemplify that they aren’t always living in the past, they post images of alumni parties (in cities where their strength is large enough to justify them) where, if the array of fine whiskies and wines and magnified close-ups of exotic cuisines are anything to go by, everyone should be having a whale of a time time, though, on the basis of photographs alone, there is little evidence of the energy and joie de vivre that are thought to accompany such splendorous occasions, which still does not mean you won’t be getting an invitation to next year’s country house/5-star hotel/exotic location gathering of the clan, despite your not having attended the preceding 25.

And, as a guilty counterpoint to the fond recollections and hedonistic revelry, you have the occasional “In Memorium” that, like the requiem Lord Tennyson wrote for his beloved Cambridge friend – though not in anywhere near the same lyrical terms – announces the passing of a former colleague and, in so doing, reminds you of your own mortality, as if such reminders of one’s impermanence were needed.

At the risk of giving offence to the hundreds who have voluntarily welcomed me to the club, befriended me without prejudgment or query, put me on their group lists and shared their world ungrudgingly with me, even to the extent of introducing me to their wives, sons, daughters, grandchildren, persons most revered, traits least liked, habits, hobbies, political opinions, religious beliefs, most favoured restaurants and least preferred travel destinations, I must say, like Groucho Marx did years before me in words more appropriate than I can ever hope to muster, I don’t want to belong to any Club that will accept people like me as a member, not if the raison d’être of its existence is to relive the past for I have neither the memory nor the affinity for it.

Or, it could simply be that with the sands of time running down, I would rather be living the moment than mourning, like poor Mr Engelbert Humperdinck, the way it used to be.

As any regular subscriber to this magazine would have ample experience of, all parties, even when an imported DJ is not belting out popular, electronically altered Bollywood hits with an enthusiasm that borders on the manic, have ambient noise, the kind that fills the blanks when conversations dangle, eases the embarrassment when someone forgets the punch line to a joke that he’s primed his audience for (or, worse still, elicits no spontaneous laughter after delivering it dramatically) and dissipates the tension when someone commits a faux pas by relaying something one’s not supposed to know (or has been sworn into silence to keep secret). The decibel level of ambient noise is directly proportional to the collective intake of ethanol (or, inversely, to the pace at which levels of various distinctively shaped bottles drop), with voices seeming to become more booming, laughter more raucous, glasses clinking more noisily, crockery crashing to the floor more thunderously, despite the wall-to-wall carpeting, whispered instructions to floating waiters sounding louder and even the air-conditioning – an unobtrusive hum till moments ago – seeming to assume a stentorian, invasive character.

Amidst this Bacchanalian revelry, it is, indeed, a brave person who, possibly by dint of having drawn the shortest straw and, consequently, nominated, against one’s wishes and proclivities, the role of designated driver for the evening, has to retain his balance among people who’ve for the most part lost theirs, calling upon the patience of a Job to circumnavigate the obstacles that passing inebriates are inclined to throw his way.

First, there’s the inebriate with the galling propensity to endlessly repeat a phrase entrapped in his (or her, because one thing intoxication is not, it is not gender specific) befuddled brain, as if it were on an endless loop, like a mantra, with even the most innocent sounding set of words tending to assume sinister connotations with each repetition, more so, if repeated in a descending order of lucidity, a simple “So glad to meet you starting as an expression of mild gratitude and ending on a tone of impending menace.

Worse still for the unfortified if it’s a whole paragraph, usually beginning with a rhetorical “Did I tell you?” that’s trapped in the woozy cerebrum, not just a single phrase, and, undeterred by your protestations that, indeed, you’ve heard it before, an attempt at a hasty exit defeated by a lunging grab of your arm, the story unfolds for the nth time from what the inebriate believes is the beginning but what you know for certain is penance for sins you’ve committed from time immemorial, absolution coming only when the tipsy teller of tales deviates from his narrative into an oblivion from which there’s no return, still clutching your arm – or any other accessible part of your anatomy – as a drowning man might a lifebuoy.

Second, there are those whose libidos are unfastened by drink, amorous instincts fanned by the spirits coursing in their veins and reaching parts even Heineken would be hard put to reach and providing a plausible excuse, if one were ever needed, for the irresponsibility of the actions to follow, viz. declaring open season on members of the opposite gender which, generally, would entail grabbing with friendly intent, embracing with more affectionate purpose and slobbering upon with somewhat less convivial consequence. Thankfully, such inebriates have a short lifecycle, like candles in the wind, their ardour artificially pumped up by a certain measure of the spirituous stuff that, if even marginally surpassed, has the exact reverse effect, swiftly dissipating all amatory inclinations just the way a tiny pinprick renders the biggest balloon flightless.

The third is the happy inebriate who, with continued fortification and approaching intoxication, gets increasingly jolly and, like Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice, decides (involuntarily, I would imagine) that if the world’s a stage where every man must play a part, then he would play the fool’s and with mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.

In my judgment, there are three stages to a happy inebriate: the first, when the mind is rousingly liberated making for coruscating wit and scintillating conversational repartee. The second stage is when the happiness quotient remains undiminished but the mind, though still open, is incapable of the focus required to engage in complex verbal jousting and, with impairment of the brain’s capacity to receive, analyse and respond to intellectual data, the accumulated happiness is channelled into acts of physical comedy of the pie-in-the-face, chewing-serviettes, putting-cutlery-in-mouth-to-distend-cheeks and kissing-every-hand-that-comes-one’s-way category, the kind that Rajendernath was famous for in the films of the Sixties when he sat on every birthday cake that happened to be in his close proximity to the great joy of the bakers of Bombay. The third is the stage of oblivion when the not-so-happy-any-longer inebriate makes a dramatic exit – from the world, so to speak – in a flurry of unarticulated action, usually not of the voluntary kind though, truth be told, the three stages of the cheerful dipso are not always distinguishable, the journey from life and soul of the party to crumpled clothes collapsed on a sofa often seamless with no detectable break in-between – stirred but not shaken and then, senseless and silent.