While building stronger institutions and human resource development, there is need to build mainstream interest in the non profit sector. Though India abounds with career opportunities for its sizable youth population, avenues for contact and commitment with issues of poverty, development and civil society are restricted. While there are options available for joining the development sector, there is serious paucity of well-designed, inter-linked and focused spaces for 'explorers'. The Youth and Civil Society Initiative has been developed by the Trust in 2003, with a view of garnering and building upon this nascent interest. Pravah is a key partner in this initiative of the Trust. The Trust's grant supports Pravah's school based programme in life skills education and seeding a resource centre for youth centered action, besides augmenting its human resources.
Registered as a non-profit in 1993, Pravah focuses on programmes to encourage social responsibility among school and college students through modules/exercises on: (a) self exploration to understand themselves, their own potential and values; (b) team building and leadership skills to enhance students' awareness of and ability to take charge of group behaviour; (c) social sensitization that involves inputs and exposure to developmental issues and participation in public advocacy events; and (d) visits to and work with non-government organisations in rural India.
The play 'Khichdi Kitsch' is the result of an intensive two-month workshop organized by Pravah, involving both professionals and amateurs. It is designed and facilitated by Jaya Iyer and Lokesh Jain, both theatre professionals, who worked with students of SMILE (Students Mobilization Initiative for Learning through Exposure).
'Khichdi Kitsch' forms part of Action Bytes: A Big Shout for Citizenship, which is both, a campaign, as well as a day-long festival celebrating an all-inclusive and proactive notion of citizenship among young people. The campaign, facilitated by a network of non-profit organizations, aims to encourage the youth to engage with the wider world through small but significant acts of citizenship, to reclaim public spaces, to meet, to exchange ideas, and to make themselves heard.
The campaign was conceived and coordinated by Pravah and partnered by 13 Delhi-based NGOs, prominent among them being Action Aid India, Youth Reach, Bluebells International School, British Council and, Oxfam. It was supported by the Trust under its Small Grant Programme.
The hour and a half long 'Khichdi Kitsch' was performed at three venues in New Delhi, catering to both individual and institutional audiences. The premiere took place on December 4, 2004, at Bluebells International School, during the day-long celebration of A Big Shout for Citizenship. Easily the highlight of the afternoon session, the play evoked an enthusiastic audience response with its high-energy performance, wacky humour, and show-stopping number 'Ma Valentine'. The play was also staged at two other venues: the B.C. Pal Auditorium in Chittaranjan Park on December 10, 11 and 12, 2004, and the Basement Theatre, India Habitat Centre on January 2 3 and 4, 2005.
The SMILE Programme
SMILE offers young people the avenues to demonstrate leadership and social responsibility, primarily through two types of exposures: rural and urban. A year-long programme for college students is run in tandem with the college session. Under the urban exposure component, students volunteer within Delhi and work with a network of participating NGOs. Students are sent for rural exposure only after they have fulfilled the urban exposure requirement. The rural exposure component begins in June, after the college examinations, and involves four to six weeks of exposure in a rural area and calls for a high level of commitment. Students go alone or in pairs. SMILE offers skills and issue-based training. Volunteers sign up for the 'Window to SMILE' programme, which involves participation in a two-day residential orientation camp in Delhi during August-September. Students are selected from this camp for further exposure. Volunteers sign up for a minimum of forty hours throughout the year. Group exposures lasting seven to ten days begin in December-January to places such as the Narmada valley, Rajasthan, and the World Social Forum in Mumbai. SMILE also holds four club activities: theatre, film, media, and action research.
The Cast
The twenty-five students in the SMILE group were familiar with the youth programme emphasizing self-development and social responsibility. They stated that the SMILE experience had been crucial in determining their future plans. About six students hope to find internships with NGOs to train as youth leaders while others expressed the desire to join the National School of Drama to train as actors or scriptwriters.
Many students are pursuing a degree in media studies at the Jamia Millia Islamia. Others belong to Aurobindo College, Deshbandhu College and Miranda House, and a few are pursuing their studies through correspondence courses. What attracts them to theatre in the first place? The reasons and motivations varied. Most welcomed it as a chance to do something different, to get involved in social issues, to make a difference in society and to pave the way for professional involvement in the development field; a few saw it as a stepping stone to a career in theatre, film and mass media and an opportunity to network, so they could land jobs after graduating. The director, Jaya Iyer, CEO, Pravah, one of the designers and facilitators of 'Khichdi Kitsch', drew on her 14 years of experience in community-based, awareness-raising, process-based theatre for school and college students.
The SMILE theatre workshop, involving both professionals and students, aims to stage a play once every two to three years, with the idea of combining 'lots of learning with the breaking of barriers'. Jaya noted that the last two plays staged by the SMILE group had been tragedies. 'The Trojan Women' by Euripides was performed after the atomic bomb blasts at Pokharan and Quetta, and won some awards. 'Andorra' (1961) by Max Frisch (1911-91), a Swiss novelist, playwright, diarist and essayist, deals with racialism, conformism, anti-Semitism, bigotry and totalitarianism. Although anti-Semitism is the overt theme, other avenues of approach are possible, and thus the play was slightly changed to resonate with present-day conditions in India.
Play
'Khichdi Kitsch' has no fixed or bound script and is constantly evolving. Each performance is somewhat different-sequences are rearranged, new songs are introduced, new lines spoken-and this improvisational energy imparts a unique flavour and dynamism to each staging. The students drew on their experiences of living in the city and came up with a play about, as the posters and flyers put it, 'our lives, identities, loves, struggles, friendships, idiosyncrasies in the city with coffee shops, flyovers, parties, mazaars, matrimony sites, festivals and ring tones as a backdrop.'
The play, an engaging series of vignettes about life in Delhi, uses the culinary metaphor of 'khichdi'-in which various ingredients blend to form a wholesome dish, a simple 'comfort food' cherished for its ability to calm jangled nerves and upset stomachs-to describe life in twenty-first-century urban India. But what appear at first to be disconnected snapshot depictions of life in Delhi are not entirely unrelated; they come full circle in the end to show how all our seemingly disparate lives are actually interconnected. The message of the play is: Like khichdi, we are all one. We need to see the common bonds that unite us, and take the first step outside our own cloistered existence to reach out to our fellow citizens. The play combines humour and serious social commentary to address the larger questions: Who are we as a people? What defines us as citizens of Delhi?
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The opening scene features a tree and a sutradhar, a former chef at Dilli Darbar restaurant, who expounds on the metaphor of the khichdi as a solution to all our problems. The Tree, symbol of the city's resilience and continuity, appears in a few other scenes (notably in the last), where it is shown to be under attack not only from pollution but also as a victim of rampant urbanization, greed and corruption.
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Echoing a similar theme is the skit 'Call You Later', featuring two friends who are meeting after fifteen years, but are constantly interrupted by their ever-beeping cell phones. As they yammer away into their respective phones, they barely have any time for each other and soon depart with an exchange of meaningless goodbyes, 'Call you later.'
Similarly, in the 'Run-Run Gym' scene-lasting only seconds and featuring flashing strobe lights and loud pounding music-we see the frenetic devotees of Lord Gym sweating away on treadmills and exercise bikes to attain salvation-as perfectly toned and fit bodies.
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'Mazaar, Mandhi House' is set at a roadside mazaar, where we meet a group of silent worshippers.
The scene soon shifts to the next skit 'Peepul Bardh Baba', which addresses the themes of rural migration, urban anomie and loneliness, overcrowding and overpopulation. We meet a garrulous and cheerful nai (barber), a weary but resilient mochi (cobbler), and a harried fruit juice wallah, all of whose livelihoods are threatened by Delhi's increasing urbanization and consumerism. The barber's income is affected by the popularity of cheap disposal razors. The juice wallah, whose business is suffering as people prefer aerated drinks, is thinking of opening a music cassette shop instead. As people prefer to discard old shoes rather than have them resoled, the mochi's trade is also suffering. Lamenting that the new consumerist society has the same attitude towards people and relationships as it does towards old shoes, he warns that it is important to repair and mend relationships if we are to survive. The construction of the flyover-which threatens their livelihood by forcing them to move elsewhere-also requires that the Tree be cut down.
The scene of 'Yes, I am a Pebble' is a book launch party-a social occasion that Delhi culture vultures have made their very own-to facilitate the author of the book of the same title. Here we encounter the Page 3 dilettantes, people who air-kiss and sip wine while burbling on about their lives. When Deepak suggests that Vrinda the actress read out a passage from Dr Sushil's new play 'Khichdi Kitsch', she chooses an extract about the little girl Tara rocking her baby brother Tendulkar to sleep under a flyover while cars race by. The grim reality of the urban dispossessed becomes raw material for a theatrical production by the privileged few. And the disparate sections of the play come full circle at the end.
Nevertheless, the play ends on an optimistic note with the scene 'Of Love …', as the Chef leads the two children to the Tree, a symbol of hope and renewal, and tells them about Peepul Bardh Baba's message of love and tolerance and the need to respect our environment: 'Man should not be arrogant. In nature, all are equal.'
Audience reaction
'Khichdi Kitsch' evoked an overwhelmingly positive response from the audience. Most people singled out the last scene, when the Chef tells the two children about Bardh Baba's message, as the most touching and profound. One man said that the scene moved him to tears. The 'Ma Valentine' scene was another favourite. Others described 'Call You Later' as a very realistic depiction of our consumerist and harried lives where nobody has time, not even for old friends. Some others said they fully identified with the dilemma of the NRI engineer in India on a quest for a suitable wife and appreciated the depiction of the clash between tradition (the matching of horoscopes and the search for caste compatibility) and modernity (laptops, coffee shops, cell phones). When asked to offer criticism or suggestions for improvement, audience members said that they had simply nothing negative to say and stated that they found the entire play a wonderful and witty commentary on the state of affairs in urban India in the twenty-first century.