Reflections: Adolf & Churchill by Pip Utton

(L) Not so solo ticket to ‘going SOLO’ for Adolf; (R) The imposing Swastika on the stage

Mumbai surely has a vibrant culture when it comes to theatre and plays. The options one has range from NCPA to Prithvi, from Sophia to Veer Savarkar Auditorium. They could also leave one dazzled enough to decide on which one to go for. The first solo play I ever watched was Broken Images written by Girish Karnad and had Shabaza Azmi playing out the role of a woman yearning for recognition in the world of unknown faces. And she did a wonderful job in that. Since then the charm of solo plays has stayed on with me. End of the month of September had the announcement of an international theatre festival ‘Going Solo’ happening in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai. An out of the city trip, which didn’t happen later, almost made me miss these two wonderful plays by Mr. Pip Utton. Both of them had a charm of their own – ‘of their own’ because of the specificities of the characters which Mr. Utton brought out on the stage at Sophia Auditorium.

In Adolf, he plays the mercurial dictator and leaves you astounded with the lengthy monologues and temperamental attitude. My own expectations were riding on the excellent performance by Robert Carlyle in Hitler: The Rise of Evil. I was, to be honest, expecting Mr. Utton to burst out on the stage while ranting anti-Jew propaganda with curses being used generously. But it did not happen. Did not happen in the beginning. His coughing represented a Hitler who was weak and feared his defeat at the hands of the Russians. The background tick-tock of the clock made me wonder for a moment if the sound engineer forgot to put the clock off as the play had already started. The beginning of the play was low in energy (again, compared to my unrealistic expectations) and the tempo begins to catch up as it progresses. The use of echo in the vitriolic speeches added to the mesmerizing effect and the use of hand gestures and body language made you believe as if Hitler himself had risen from the ashes to come and enchant you. And there was a surprise. Half-way through the play, Mr. Utton removed his Hitler-like wig, his overcoat with the Nazi Swastika and performed an act which would be called a ‘stand-up’ comedy act. He regaled us with observations on how we tend to make heroes out of none and how heroes make a fool out of us by playing with our emotions. And towards the end, say two or three minutes, he was back in Adolf’s character with the same haunting & echoing voice drilling our souls with fear and hypnotism.

Tickets for Churchill – they made me run and down the hill

My experience of wanting to watch Churchill is in itself not short of drama. I reached around 20 minutes before the play began. Then I realized that neither I nor my girlfriend has cash on us and the college guys with a makeshift counter don’t have swipe machines. So I run out to the uphill to the main street to find an ATM. Punch in the PIN and it says, “unable to process request”. Try it for the second time and end up with the same result. And I realize that I don’t have enough cash in that card. My other cards were at home and I had happily taken them out of my wallet and kept them in my bag thinking why carry three cards when I wouldn’t need them anyway on a working Monday. But still trying my luck, I crossed the busy chockablock road and tried my luck in a second ATM. No money, no play. So I call up my girlfriend and run down the street to get her ATM and somehow manage to withdraw cash and be inside the auditorium on time. Though because of this drama of my own, I missed the opportunity to strike a conversation with Mr. Utton, who was chatting outside dressed in jeans and shirt. Tired and sweaty, I seated myself for Churchill.

Mr. Utton as Churchill, with the world as a globe next to him

 

Churchill was a biographical play structured in a way that it showed Churchill’s statue, standing over the Thames somewhere near the Westminster, comes alive and starts talking. Mr. Utton brings out the good side of Churchill in the fact that he never cheated on his wife though always surrounded by beautiful women, but also his wrong one as obvious from his tendencies to not let of the spoils of British Empire. Churchill’s life as a young boy playing with his brother, with his parents and in the public schools – all of it – is spoken about by him. He also expresses his anger at Hitler for his overtures in Europe and his desire to rule over the world. The most interesting parts of this play were the ones which focused on the witty, intelligent and ‘man of letters’ side of Churchill, his jolly verbal fights with Bernard Shaw and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mr. Utton even drank a couple of pints of probably whiskey on stage! And smoked a cigar too! The monologues were a little slow in the middle and I surely lost track once or twice, but nothing that would take away the sheen from an exemplary performance. That was Mr. Utton at his best.

For one being able to play the roles of Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill with noticeable ease and panache is not something many actors would be able to do. Mr. Pip Utton, undoubtedly, deserves a standing ovation.

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Zakirnama

(Please click on the orange coloured Play button above before you start reading)

 

 

 

“Aunty, aunty!”, shouted Zakir in his shrill voice perched atop the high stool, brush in his right hand and a packet of tambaku clenched tightly in his left. The emptiness of the large room made his voice echo. It was nine-thirty in the morning and he already had been working since over two hours with his boys. The days weren’t of winter yet, but the calm of morning had a pleasing effect on him. Otherwise too he was never short-tempered or irritable, just a little fidgety with his depthless words and childlike actions. He was half done with the painting-job which was to be finished a week before Diwali so that his aunty could have enough time to bring a sense of order into the household, currently strewn all over with dust, paint blobs, and tattered newspapers.

“Aunty! Where’s my tea? Have been wanting since so long now. If you can’t give it to me now then I’d better go out and have it. Can’t wait anymore”, and he rattled off the orders for his perfect tea to be made with cow’s milk, tea bags from the Nilgiris, herbs, three teaspoonful of sugar. Luxury, when could be had, shouldn’t be refused. The chai from gallah was no match for his signature morning drink.

“Sorry, sorry, beta. I got busy with pooja and totally forgot about your chai“, she spoke while hurrying to offer water to the Tulsi plant in the verandah. The rattle of the utensils and the clanking of the stirrer soothed his frayed nerves somewhat. He kept the brush aside, popped the tambaku in his shirt pocket and climbed down the stool. He and his boys waited at the backside of the home, patiently this time as even bhajiyas were being fried for them today.

“Zakir”, his aunty shouted from inside the kitchen while cleaning the kitchen slab. “Zakir! Come here. Have some work for you today”. He went inside with a bhajiya in his hand while attempting not to bite too much of it lest he burn his tongue.

“Yes, aunty”

“Now that your uncle has gone away for some work and won’t be returning before evening, I need you to take all of those idols of gods and goddesses and the paintings as well and immerse them in the pond next to the highway”

“But aunty, that pond is far away and I am not going there right now”, he said in his trademark swagger. His mannerisms and way of talking were more Hyderabadi than like that of the state in which he had spent his lifetime. He was only thirty-four but always had stories to regale one with of humour, awe, and sometimes disgust.

“Beta, am not taking a no for an answer. You need to do it today well before your uncle returns. If he sees these being disposed of then he is going to fight with me again. Don’t you remember what happened last week? Those old bedsheets? And also don’t eat any non-veg food today before immersing them”

“Alright, alright. Don’t stress over this. I will do something about it. Maybe I will take them with me when I go for my namaaz in the masjid during lunch time. That should work, right?”

“Yes, yes. Should work”, and she closed the refrigerator door and headed upstairs for some rest.

Zakir, a Musalman, was pious about his practices and beliefs. However, when it came to work in his aunty’s home, he kept them aside and did whatever she asked him to do. Whether it was buying milk in the morning or getting vegetables from the nearby market in the evening. Or even fetching flowers for her morning pooja. And his aunty too, a Hindu, was least concerned about ritualistic righteousness. To her, he was still the young starry-eyed boy who had helped her paint the home more than nearly two decades ago. He was still his beta.

He was done with his portion of the wall of the drawing hall and thought of heading to the masjid before it became too crowded on that Friday. He called out his boys and proceeded with them to the masjid. The idols of Hindu gods and goddesses and the pictures of Rama and Sita were all jostling for space in the large plastic bag hung upon the front of his cycle. The front wheel against the bag made a chiseling sound.

On reaching the masjid he pondered upon where to keep the bag but decided not to keep it hanging outside for the fear of it being stolen. Thieves, after all, have no religion, he thought to himself. And anyways it was just a matter of half-an-hour or so and hence the bag won’t be noticed by anyone inside. No harm intended and no harm done.

“Asalaam Alaikum maulvi sahab”, he wished the head of the masjid. “Alaikum As Salaam” came back the prompt greeting. As the worshipers kneeled the loudspeaker started playing the prayer as a call to the neighbourhood muslims to come and pray. After his prayers, rather than going straight for lunch he slept for some time inside the premises to give rest to his tired self. The afternoon sun had showed no respite to them on their way. A quick lunch at the nearby Halal Meat Restaurant, and he and the boys were back at their workplace. She too had just finished her lunch and was busy watching satsang on the television. They resumed their work but couldn’t continue for too long as suddenly a crowd started building up in the lane outside. They, for some unknown reason, were howling religious Hindu chants and with a great fervor.

“Aunty, looks some sadhu baba mandli has come for donation. Maybe some food as well they would want. Or is it some festival today? Ramnaumi?”

“No, it’s not. Otherwise how could have I missed it? But still let me check”, and she got up from the chair and flipped the dirty calendar on the window. The hydra-hands of Lord Ganesha bestowed blessings upon her from the front page, while Lord Krishna gazed at her from his serene eyes from the second page. On the lower right hand corner was the block where she had marked all religiously-important days and nothing was marked for that day. It wasn’t a day on which she would have to get up at four in the morning, wash the idols, pray to the sun, keep a fast, recite never-ending mantra or feed the cows with the symbolic roti. It was one of those days on which she could just pray for a couple of hours and see some satsang on the television set and be content with it for having done whatever she could to dedicate herself to the gods. And the goddesses. And their avtars. And to just about everyone except her frail and neglected body.

“No, no. There isn’t just about anything today. Maybe some kirtan has been organized by the temple nearby. Let me check”, and she stepped out of the door. The frenzy quickly convinced her of the non-religious underpinnings of the crowd. Some were shouting anti-Muslim statements, while many had sharp-edged weapons in their hands. She asked one of the men from the crowd on what was happening. “Doomsday! Doomsday for the Musalmans today. They have hurt the feelings and beliefs of us, the Hindus. They will not be spared. They will….”, and he disappeared in the meandering crowd. But before she could go inside, a man, old for his age to be involved in such activities, came up to her and cautioned her, “Some Hindus have been hurt and their homes attacked by Muslim followers of the nearby masjid. Our Hindu brothers didn’t do anything. They were innocent, and yet were attacked. You be safe and stay inside. Don’t venture out. And stay clear of Muslims. They are not worthy of being trusted. They stab you in …”, and before he could finish she went inside and closed all the open doors and windows.

“Zakir! Get down at once from this stool”, her voice loud and frightening like never before. Zakir was bemused by this but nonetheless followed her instructions.

“Where are all of your boys? Where have they gone? I can’t see anyone around”, she thundered.

“They have just gone for having some paan, aunty. They will be back soon. But what happened, aunty? You seem very agitated”.

“Don’t question. Let’s go upstairs. This crowd outside doesn’t make me comfortable. Some Hindu-Mulsim skirmishes have happened and it is not safe for you and your boys to be seen around”, and she grabbed his thin arm and pulled him upstairs. She forced him inside the smaller bedroom and asked him not to come out or call out for her till the next few hours. She locked the room from outside.

“And I hope all of your friends are safe and return safely either to their homes or here. These times are not good…”, she spoke as she tried to comfort him. “Zakir, beta, hope you have immersed those idols in the pond. Your uncle might be returning anytime. You did, right?”

And his thoughts drowned him.

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History As A Distorted Memory

History, it is often said, is written by the winning side. Gavrilo Princip as a hero is rarely heard of and may even be frowned upon by the current lot of historians. He may have inadvertently triggered the chain of events resulting in World War I, but still a lot of unsolved mysteries surround him. It’s been more than 99 years now and he is still being raked up on various websites and podcasts. Assassination of the Archduke by Greg King and Sue Woolmans described how Princip “had spent the last half hour wandering the quay before glumly lolling in front of Schiller’s Delicatessen“. They did not mention any sandwich-eating-assassin sitting in a cafe around the corner. However, things are not always what they seem.

History as a memory may not percolate well down the funnel of falsified perceptions, while memory as history serves more than necessary the purpose of  self validation and justification. Mike Dash on Smithsonian wrote that Princip never ate the proverbial and otherwise sandwich and traced it to a BBC documentary of 2003 for spreading the myth, and the probable origins in a novel. But is Smithsonian correct all the way? Forget all the way, is it correct in the beginning itself with the photograph of Gavrilo Princip being arrested?

 

Dr. Paul Miller of University of Birmingham and McDaniel College investigates the controversies surrounding the representative photograph in a podcast called ‘The Sandwich that Sabotaged Civilisation‘ and even engages in a philosophical musing about the tussle between memory and history. While Angela in Far & Wise recounts her own story of discovering how imagination reconstructs the past and moulds it attuned to our present perceptions.

 

Terrorism has roots much older than 9/11 attacks, which have been embedded so strongly in our minds by the incessant plundering by the media. The BBC Radio 4 podcast talks about how that fateful day of June 28, 1914 turned the course of history with the ensuing Great War. Indeed it did.

Gavrilo: I am not a criminal, because I destroyed that which was evil

After all, metaphorically speaking, what was history?

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Bucketful of Memories

(Please click on the orange coloured Play button above before you start reading)

16:00:08 Just a nudge would have done it. Just a little shove would have sufficed. It was only a matter of quick effort to end the misery and start anew. But his thoughts were still muddled when it came to deciding on the vector of his effort. Which direction would it be? A pull of his legs upward strong enough to crack his neck? Or a pull downward on the fan breaking the bed? As the chair precariously weighed its options, he tried to maneuver them. He was distraught by his double life, one lived in the unrealistic world and other in his surreal fanciful cinematic reel. The nudge did come a little later. “I’m home”.

16:01:07 He had tried hard to bring some fun into his life. Hobbies which were long forgotten, kits brought out from jammed cabinets, notebooks made home by cobwebs. Everything he could. It had worked to some extent. The revival of his childhood memories of playing with his parents became as fresh as morning dew on grass: ready to disappear the moment your warm breath came close to it.

16:02:06 She, his wife, had made him happy as much as she could. But beyond that the dichotomy of their flagellating lives was apparent to everyone around them. Their incessant fights, inundating shout-matches and verbal crossfires were all too bold to be restricted behind locked-up doors and closed windows. He never thought that it would come to such a bad state.

16:03:05 Both of his parents had passed away some years ago. This had broken him. His youthful charisma had given way to chimerical plans to reclaim his happiness. The treasure trove of the forests called him again and again, rising above the din of a ‘cityful’ but lifeless existence. His inability to gather courage was only to be blamed.

16:04:04 His dream of seeing the whole world had been majorly successful. He had traveled to many a countries, basking in their esoteric cultures and meaningless banter of the locals. All he needed more was nothing. Nothing in its absolute sense of an existential crisis. And an identity crisis which pulls you in two opposite directions but is mean enough even with a mean of zero to leave you there, as it is, to burn down under your own weight. 

16:05:03 The coming together of two young lovers fresh out of college was like a blob of an ocean making an appearance in a parched desert. Their sublime fires had engulfed all their sanity and thoughtfulness. The extrapolated future was magnetic and stronger than the drab past. The colors brighter than the black and white of yesterday. The fragrances of the love lanes attractive than the smells of singledom.

16:06:02 In college he was a bright chap. Acing his subjects was not a task but an art for him. Cynosure of the professors and an eyesore for competitors. He whiled away his time though on video-games and novels. Chided he was by his parents for this, but loved all the more by them as he was their only offspring. Notes he took diligently and remember he did efficiently. Interests of his were wide and deep, shallow only when life skills he knead.

16:07:01 His childhood was at most plain but full of innocent pleasures. The vast countryside in which grew up wasn’t sparse in the greens nor lacking in mates, distant though their homes were. His parents farm had horses and sheep alike, dogs and hens abundant & rabbits and geese infinite. The dust and gusty winds had honed his sportsmanship and the thunders and muck his grit. School was nothing but a distraction in his world of endless possibilities.

16:08:00 His birth was a difficult one. The nurses were tensed as much as her mother’s muscles. His father paced the outer verandah and only a shrill cry could calm him down. He ran inside and pushed wide open the wooden door to hold his baby in his arms. Glimpse of him from a distance was enough to make his strong demeanor melt away. The bread-earner wanted a daughter, while the bread-eater wanted a son. A daughter-son he was to be, beginning to live a life of doubled expectations. The mother was blissfully happy and while giving him to the father uttered, “He’s home”.

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Review: Moonwalking with Einstein

Moonwalking with Einstein

Memory always has been a prized commodity in schools and colleges. The more you could remember (from rote) and vomit it onto the exam sheet, the more famous you became amongst your fellow mates, the teachers and even amongst the girls who were ready to make you a brother in school by tying a rakhi on your hand – though probably the same girls would run after you after hitting puberty. My own experiences have been mixed – I sometimes surprise myself and especially my girlfriend with memories of old incidents and accompanying vivid descriptions of events and people involved. Sometimes, just one incident is enough to trigger a barrage of interlinked thoughts and to start a mental voyage in time washed away by newer impressions. And many a times I can’t remember trivial things like the name of the trains for which I have booked a seat, the prices of fruits for comparing which store sells cheaper. And a lot of other things too which I don’t remember while I write this. Ah! My memory.

I distinctively remember one incident from my childhood – I was probably 10~12 years old and my younger brother around 7~9 years. It was afternoon time and both of us had just come back from school. It was a Saturday and hence a half day. Tele-shopping was around for some years but it had never resulted in us buying anything. On that particular day, there was a product that was being advertised on one of those tele-shopping channels (or it was during those off hours when you could see nothing but tele-shopping ads). In a small auditorium there was an audience comprising of mostly middle-aged and old people, and on the stage there were a handful of people selected by the host randomly and given memorizing tasks. After some tips from the host, their performance improved and the audience was left spellbound. Then the host challenged the audience to one more task – he would remember their names as soon as he got to know of them. So he made around a dozen or more of them stand up and after listening to their names started making them sit back again after reciting their names correctly. And it left us, me, my brother and my mother, impressed. And there was a special offer going on – with the audio cassettes of the techniques we would also get a free tutorial which would help us speed up our math skils – from multiplication, to division to anything. And the total cost was around a thousand rupees – a big amount back then. We pestered on to our mom to order it, and anyways it was coming with a money-back guarantee. My mom, too eager for both of us to perform well in school, ordered it. And after a couple of hours, a young guy came on a bike and delivered the cassettes to us. Before paying him we asked him to wait so that we could test them and make sure they weren’t damaged. After all it was the first time we had ordered through telephone. When we started listening to the cassettes, we were shocked that it wasn’t something that was fun – it was drab with some sounds being associated with some vowels, some numbers being associated with images etc. And it turned out to be a mistake paying so much for it. So we went down and mom told the guy that it was we, the children, had ordered it on phone and she was totally unaware of it. Luckily the guy, who seemed to be a newbie in the trade, agreed and took them back and went on his way. Day saved! I now realize that the problem wasn’t with Tony Buzan’s Harry Lorayne’s product but my childish expectations of becoming a memory savant just by listening to some audio for hours – but Buzan’s Lorayne’s marketing also had a hand in the formation of such a view. And that was a much close as I would to memory techniques until my post-graduation wherein an Information Technology professor was more interested in Mind-Mapping than his own subject. He even provided us some free off-the-mill mind-mapping software to practice. Nothing came out of it really, I can’t even recall the name of the software.

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Tweets by Tony Buzan

The title of this book, Moonwalking with Einstein, was catchy enough for me to pick it up and flip through. Joshua Foer is a journalist and while writing for Slate covered the US Memory Championship and in the process got hooked to it and won it the next year himself! He gives an overview of how historically memory has been prized and it was used extensively, until the recent inventions of printing press and storage devices – ‘recent’ being used in a sense relative to the fact that for millions of years all we had were our memories. He meets several competitors and memory masters and starts practicing it in the basement of his parents’ home. Over time, he improves his retention capacity and also comes across savants like Kim Peek. I had first heard of Kim Peek in 2011 when I came across a documentary about him. Joshua even meets Tony Buzan, yes, the same guy whose audio training material I almost bought, and gives us interesting glimpses in the millionaire’s life. Buzan is still hyper-active in his life and even writes poetry.

 

The most interesting parts of the book are where Joshua connects with the reader and gives them hints and tips on memory techniques and even names resources which one could use. While, the most boring ones are where we get to learn of how the ancient people used to memorize and how their techniques weren’t perfect. The sections describing outliers like someone who hardly remembers, someone who never forgets, someone who calculates in a jiffy make for an interesting read, however, do not add up to the active participation from the reader’s perspective.

 

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Tweets by Joshua Foer

A book that should definitely arouse your interest in mnemonics and will surely help you realize that if just another average guy like us, Joshua, could do it, then even we can do it – not to win any memory championship but to improvise our retention which definitely will be a great booster professionally and personally too. My final word: buy it today and start implementing the techniques and wish a bye-bye to forgetful life. There is a chapter about the ‘OK Plateau’ when his reciting times hit a stagnant spot and he writes how a conscious effort at improving one’s skills is important to be amongst the best. This reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell‘s Outliers in which he had written about the 10,000-hour rule for mastering anything. Joshua Foer can be regarded as a notch above Malcolm Gladwell because he actual works on those techniques rather than just write about them.

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