The National Award-winning director Prakash Belawadi's performance in an ensemble theatre work surprised him with a global honour Down Under
Himesh Mankad (MUMBAI MIRROR; July 18, 2019)

Prakash Belawadi, renowned theatre artiste whose 2003 debut directorial, Stumble bagged the National Award for Best Feature Film, is now winning accolades as an actor. He was recently conferred a prestigious award in Australia for his performance in Counting And Cracking, an epic ensemble theatre work which follows a Sri Lankan-Australian family over four generations, from Colombo to Pendle Hill. Nominated in the ‘Best Male Actor In A Play’ category, alongside established names from across the globe like Amer Hlehel, Kelton Pell and Wayne Blai, he is understandably ecstatic with the global recognition.

“Honestly, I don’t even know how to respond to this honour as I am more of a backstage person having spent most of my life in theatre, doing lighting and direction. I have taught acting, but I started acting professionally only after I turned 50,” he informs, quick to add, “I had never anticipated a career in acting, let alone international recognition at this level. A Helpmann Award is the Australian equivalent of Tony Awards for Broadway or Laurence Olivier Awards for West End theatre.”

Prod him on details of the play, in particular his character, and Belawadi informs that it is the result of an inspired effort by Eamon Flack and Shakthidharan, with the latter borrowing a lot material from his own family. “My character Apah is based on his own great grandfather, a famous Lankan Tamil mathematician and parliamentarian who was distraught over the escalation of language and ethnic conflicts in Ceylon, which was later renamed Sri Lanka,” he explains.

The play packed full houses Down Under despite not having a single white Australian in the cast. “It was an eye opener for me in many ways. The location itself had special significance for a country that has had to reckon with migration and its own history of colonialism,” he states.

Ask him about the difference in approach to acting in films as compared to theatre and he explains that the latter is really a medium of experience created in shared space and time, live, with an audience. “The performance is not fragmented into edited cuts, close-ups and sequenced shots. An actor has to imagine narrative trajectories in completely different ways,” he says. “There are no retakes on stage, no time out. You go out there and live it. Actors work within themselves, with each other and the audience to build a narrative aesthetic. It’s thrilling but also somewhat frightening.”

Next up for Prakash Belawadi is the Sujeeth directorial Saaho, fronted by Prabhas and Shraddha Kapoor. But prod him on it and he suddenly clams up and the curtains come down.

Girish Karnad lived to ignite thought and provoke anger on bleak future of governance and theatre
Prakash Belawadi (MUMBAI MIRROR; June 11,2019)

In his autobiographical work, Aadadta Aayushya (Years in Play), Girish Karnad makes an extraordinary dedication at the very outset to a doctor who did not get an opportunity to serve his pregnant mother. He begins with a conversation at the Dharwad home of his parents, in 1973. Then 35, but already a celebrated playwright, filmmaker and actor, appointed director of the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, for young Girish, life was good. But then, suddenly, his father turns to his mother and says: “And we thought we wanted to abort this one!”

Girish’s mother had turned red and mumbled: “Uh...yes... but it was your idea, not mine! Why bring up all that now?” Curious, the young Girish probed and learnt that his mother had indeed gone to a clinic in Pune to get the abortion done, had waited for close to an hour for the doctor to attend to her, in vain. She got bored and went home.

The young Girish had been bewildered: “The thought that the Universe would exist, whether I existed or not depressed me,” he writes. The character Kunal Padubidri, in Girish’s play on Bengaluru, ‘Boiled Beans on Toast’, says something similar at the close of play, but adds: “But then, if I didn’t exist, would it matter?”

It does. It would be seriously understating to say Girish Karnad was talented. He won a Rhodes scholarship with Mathematics. He won fame and awards in literature, drama and cinema. He was given coveted appointments by government in many academies and institutions. But Girish always seemed to struggle to make sense of it all. His character, Puru, who exchanges his youth with his ambitious father Yayati, and with tragic consequences, cries at the end of the play: “What does it all mean, God, what does it mean?” It was young Girish, wondering, in passionate agony.

Girish wrote ‘Yayati’ before he went to Oxford, much before he came under the influence of the Existentialists. Even the rational and material world he imagined was originally rooted in philosopher Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s ‘Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism’. He writes in his autobiography: “Before travelling to England, I read Rajaji’s condensed versions of Ramayana and Mahabharata so that I would have a grasp of our Itihaasa-Puranas. Even in the condensed 300-page books, Rajaji manages beautifully in capturing the sub-plots and stories... The idea that the son was older than the father seemed dramatic to me.” The year was 1960. He was only 22 years old.

What did it all mean to young Girish? His grounds of inspiration, largely, have been the great Indian epics – Ramayana and Mahabharata, folk tales and histories of Indian rulers. But Girish quarrels with the traditional interpretations of the stories. In his 2002 World Theatre Day message, an honour given by the International Theatre Institute to the most outstanding achievers, Girish cites from the Natyashastra, but in disagreement with traditional understanding of the events surrounding the opening performance: “The myth, it seems to me, is pointing to an essential characteristic of theatre which Brahma’s placatory remarks could not possibly acknowledge, that every performance – however carefully devised – carries within itself the risk of failure, of disruption and therefore of violence. The minimum that a live performance requires is a human being performing (that is, pretending to be someone else) and another one watching him or her, and that is a situation already fraught with uncertainty... The Myth of the First Performance points out that in theatre, the playwright, the performers and the audience form a continuum, but one which will always be unstable and therefore potentially explosive... That is why theatre is signing its own death warrant when it tries to play too safe. On the other hand, that is also the reason why, although its future often seems bleak, theatre will continue to live and to provoke.”

The plays of Girish Karnad, over these 60 years, have certainly provoked many to anger. But it would be irrational to deny that he won more praise and international renown than rebuke in his playwriting and, later, as an actor and director in cinema and television. But where Girish did find, and often, a “potentially explosive” and fraught situation, is in the realm of real politics. In the years of domination of the Indian National Congress, which often adopted the rhetoric and slogans of the leftist protest itself, Girish and many of his contemporaries like the late U R Ananthamurthy were admired and rewarded by the intellectual establishment as well as powerful figures in governance for the positions they took in conflicts rooted in identity issues of religion, caste or language – Urdu news on DD, Kaveri dispute, the proposals to ban beef and so on. The continuing rise of the BJP and Hindutva over the past 30 years troubled him, and Girish has openly and politically sided with the Congress and its allies.

As an admirer and a friend who has been fortunate to know him and work with him, as someone who has disagreed with his positions when it comes to identity politics, I can only say that he was India’s greatest living playwright. That he was generous to a fault – with monetary compensation for work, hospitality, fulsome praise for work done with other directors and projects. That he had the sensibility to identify himself as a Kannada writer, who wrote first in Kannada and allowed the translations later, even though he had more admirers who could offer bigger rewards in Marathi, Hindi or English, all of which he was competent in. That he was the essential Indian who knew Bharat, but quarrelled with it. That he was far more complex and nuanced in the political and human conflicts he saw in his creative work than in seminars and street protests. That I will miss him.

This is now a poorer India without him.

The writer is an Indian theatre, film, television and media personality, an activist and a journalist from Bangalore. He co-founded the Centre for Film and Drama and launched the Suchitra School of Cinema and Dramatic Arts. 


Karnad before the opening of play Flowers at Prithvi in 2007

Vickey Lalwani (MUMBAI MIRROR; December 30, 2013)

Jackky Bhagnani has just returned from Indore after a long schedule of Afzal Ahmad’s Youngistaan. While the young actor has been trying to keep his role in the film a closely guarded secret, the cat is finally out of the bag. Mirror can not only reveal Jackky’s part in the film, but also has details about two other important characters.

By the looks of it, Jackky's character is modelled on the Vice President of the Indian National Congress, Rahul Gandhi. In several scenes the actor is seen in a kurta-pyjama and Nehru jacket which seem to have come out of the politician's wardrobe. He even sports glasses similar to the ones Rahul wears and also his stubble.

Wait, there's more. Seems Jackky's character also has shades of Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi's seventh Chief Minister and declines to stay in the residence provided the government. The Aam Aadmi Party leader, who was sworn in as the CM on Saturday, has also refused to move into the official bungalow. Copy or coincidence? Ahmad, who has a degree in mechanical engineering from a Delhi college retorts, “Neither, the scene was shot three months ago!”

Jackky who insists that he is very clued into the country's politics however admits of meeting a few politicians before the film went on floors. Prod him on who they were and he refuses to divulge names. All he will say is, "My role has the positive nuances of many of our netas. Perhaps the attire, along with the stubble, is making people think that it is Rahul Gandhi.”

Pranjal Khandhdiya, executive producer of MSM Motion Pictures, the production house, which is collaborating with Vashu’s Puja Entertainment on the project, adds, “Jackyy plays a politician who thinks ahead of his time, like Rahul Gandhi, Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal and Akhilesh Yadav.” Prakash Belawadi, who was last seen in Shoojit Sircar's Madras Café, is playing the Union Finance Minister and according to a source close to the film "wears glasses like P Chidambaram".

Farooq Shaikh, who passed away on Saturday, canned all his scenes in Indore before flying to Dubai on a family vacation. His charcter bears an uncanny resembalnce to Ahmed Patel, Political Secretary to Congress President Sonia Gandhi. “The film is in sync sound so we will retain Farooque’s voice. Thank God, we won’t need a dubbing artiste, ” says Ahmad.