Published in The Hindu today.
“I am fascinated by the relationship between the puppeteer and the puppet,” says Anurupa Roy, founder of Kat Katha and director of About Ram, a new media theatre presentation that had the audience spellbound when it played recently as part of the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) New Performance Festival. Produced by Kat Katha in collaboration with Vishal Dar, About Ram germinated three years ago when Roy watched a Balinese Ramayan. “Watching the Balinese version made me realise that the story changes as it travels,” she explains. “As it travels, it takes on different nuances. I started studying different versions of the Ramayana and came across Bhavabhuti’s Ramayana, which looks at it as the ultimate, tragic love story. It revolves around the theme of universal loneliness—that each human being is ultimately alone. So when Ram chooses kingdom over Sita, the last lines of the poem say ‘he ruled for ten thousand years—alone’.” (more…)
