Stand aside, Mr Siskel!

How fast can you rattle out a story? One look at someone on the road and stories burst out like the staccato bursts from an automatic rifle. A fourty-something woman crossing the road with two kids. Probably a hard-working housewife trying to make ends meet while she worries constantly over her drunkard husband and her two lovely kids. The kids may probably hate their father, but I suppose they hate losing a family more. They are planning to study harder so that they can earn a lot and keep their mother happy. The mother probably does some tailoring to earn that extra cash.

Every story is someone else's until it is told - that is a line from a play that I watched recently. Coming back from the theatre, I exercised my new-found storytelling expertise on random people. The woman with the two kids was my first victim of generalization for the sake of fictional embellishment. I stereotyped her in order to make her story mine. Her burdens, her sorrows, the pathos - they belong to me now. I feel like the antithesis of one of those Dementors from Harry Potter that suck out happiness from humans.

And now, I have passed on the story to you. It is your baby now. You have to nourish her and give her scars. You have to make sure that she cries and laughs. A writer has no responsibility towards his words. Indeed, any art need not have any point to it.

And now, we come to the crux - that play. It is called Water Lillies. A very interesting ploy - using three seperate conversations to make us understand something. A trilogy - it was called. The conversations were interesting, both on and off the stage. What really let me down was the director's earnest desire to send what has been legally termed as a 'message' to the audience. Why? Why should there be a point to a play? Or a book? Have we been so conditioned with the concept of a climax that we do whatever it is that we can do to bring it to an end? Why can't a play just be?

Barring that, there was nothing else that ruined my day. I was drenched in both the creativity deluge and the rain from above. The sky was golden and the rain was raunchy. And my stories were fast overpowering my senses. Every single person after that woman gave me volumes and volumes of stories. I was looking for patterns. An old man on the street, looking at the passersby hungrily, hoping for a rupee or two. Was he deserted by his selfish son? I have been watching way too many soap operas.

Another thing that I noticed in the play - a certain lilt and tune in the delivery of dialogue. That's me - nitpicking. There was a critic that was sitting next to me, and he whispered in my ear towards the end of the play - "I know nothing about the cast or the director but I bet you that more than half of them are Brahmins." I went backstage and challenged them with this accusation. And every single one of them said in a I'm-not-a-racist-but-damn!-am-I-better-than-you! kind of a voice, "Why yes! I am a Brahmin! How did he guess that?" I was forcefully reminded of the various Malayalees that have asked me how I found out their place of origin when they hadn't spoken a word in Malayalam.

Couldn't resist but show you that there was no point to this post. And nor is there an ending. Do you get the 'message'?