Turn up at Ranga Shankara one evening. You are given a topic. 24 hours later, you hand in a script for a 10 minute play. You watch as your script is assigned directors and actors by lottery. Two days later you turn up and watch slack-jawed as the whole shebang goes live. 3 Kannada plays. 3 Hindi plays. 3 English plays. House full. This is the madness of Great Galata. Conceived by Nimi Ravindran and Shiva Pathak as a World Theatre Day this was the second edition.
This year I was invited to write a script. And I did. The Martian Sends Postcards Home was directed by the wonderful Neel Chaudhuri and had a crazy cast of four: Jimmy Xavier, Deepti Sudhindra, Vinod Ravindran and Ranji. I had a blast. I was also tickled to meet a lot of Bangalore acquaintances including a girl I went to an acting workshop with a decade ago. I am still the world’s worst actor but she’s now doing Kannada theatre fulltime.
