| TAHAR NAMTI RANJANA |
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Tahar
Namti Ranjana (Ranjana)
Performed in various venues throughout London and other cities it is a deeply moving theatre
production.
1960’s Kolkata. A thundering monsoon night. Ranjana has managed to get clearance from
the home office and the prison’s superintendent to visit Kaushik, a convict waiting to be hanged at dawn, the man she
thinks might be her long-lost brother. She has travelled 400 miles to listen to Kaushik’s story; a sinuous tale
shifting between reality and fiction, made of half-truths. that steps out of the shadow to take centre place in a cleverly
orchestrated chessboard of lies, emotions and death.
Pundit the priest reads the Holy Scriptures and
tries to ease his final stay in our world. Biraj, the officer in charge, has doubts about Kaushik’s story. Biraj is
also a keen player of the national pastime, chess and he doesn’t seem to be the only one that night. They will all
revert to their true selves, crossing each other’s paths on that very chessboard in one short but intense night.
In the game of life, it is not necessary to be good, it’s not even necessary to be blameless. The only
thing needed is to be strong because nature abhors weakness. There is no survival of the fittest because nothing survives, no
one
prevails, all life is lived in the eye blink of eternity. The best that we can hope for is that we stave off
the abyss long enough so we can feel in control, so we can feel that for an instant the world followed our pattern. In the
absence of
that, with the battle lost and the final indignity suffered, the meek and the powerful alike can only
hope that they are looked upon with kindness; that their soul shows no taint upon themselves.
Ecdysis is
the process by which particular insects shed their constricting outer skeleton so that they can grow. People perform
psychological ecdysis every day presenting a new identity, making excuses and telling lies so that they can be protected from
the consequences of being who they really are. The city gives us many reasons to be all men to all things, identity can shift
with the wind. The problem is that, having adopted so many new personae, is it possible to know who we are in the first
place?
Ranjana has been filmed and transformed to DVD with English subtitles.
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