INDIA SHASTRA :Reflections on the Nation in our Time by Shashi Tharoor

Author:Shashi Tharoor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9789384067281
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Published: 2014-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

STEPHANIA: THE QUEST TO EXCEL

ome years ago I received a gushing fan letter from someone who had chanced upon a copy of the programme brochure of the St. Stephen’s College Shakespeare Society production of Antony and Cleopatra in 1974. She couldn’t believe her eyes at the galaxy of names on the cast list. The title roles were played by me and a young Mira Nair (St. Stephen’s, all-male in those days, borrowed its female thespians from Miranda House, and repaid the compliment in kind, so that the previous year I had taken the lead in Miranda’s production of Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards). Pompey was Amir Raza Husain, who would go on to become a renowned theatre director and impresario; Enobarbus, Ramu Damodaran, later Private Secretary to Prime Minister Narasimha Rao; Roman legionaries included Arun Singh, Asoke Mukerji and Gautam Mukhopadhyaya, now our ambassadors in Paris, New York and Yangon; and amongst the slaves and spear-carriers stood the brilliant novelist-to-be Amitav Ghosh and the future advertising guru Piyush Pandey. ‘All of you together on one stage!’ gushed the fan. ‘What was it like? Did you all have a sense of destiny, knowing what you would become?’

I no longer recall my reply, but I don’t believe any of us were unduly concerned about what we would become: at College, we just were. And if the fan had known about the Stephanian ‘ShakeSoc types’ who for one reason or the other didn’t act in that particular production, she would have had even more to be awestruck about. The likes of Kabir Bedi and Roshan Seth, Stephanian stage legends both (as, in a slightly more modest vein, was Kapil Sibal) had passed out a couple of years earlier. But Rajiv Mehrotra, already a TV star on Doordarshan, declined to audition, future novelists Rukun Advani and Anurag Mathur didn’t make the cut, and celebrity-quizmaster-to-be Siddhartha Basu, much to everyone’s surprise, auditioned but was passed over for a role. (He instead wrote an acerbic review of the production in the campus newspaper, Kooler Talk, describing my Antony as a ‘flippant, underfed Romeo’).

Sense of destiny? Not consciously, except in the sense that by getting into College, you had already arrived; there was an implicit sense that the possibilities were limitless. Yet none of us would have felt that there was anything particularly unusual about our peers: St. Stephen’s in those days simply attracted people like that. Hindsight, however, prompts something of the sense of wonderment apparent in the anonymous Wikipedia entry that informs the world, rather breathlessly, that my ‘contemporaries included the politician Salman Khurshid, the documentary filmmaker Rajiv Mehrotra, the quizmaster Siddhartha Basu, the novelists Amitav Ghosh, Rukun Advani and Anurag Mathur, the theatre impresario Amir Raza Husain, the editor and politician Chandan Mitra, the columnist Swapan Dasgupta, the economist and media crusader Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, the IAS officer-turned social activist Harsh Mander, the television personality Sunil Sethi, the diplomat Jayant Prasad, the World Trade Organization executive Harsh Vardhan Singh and the advertising guru Piyush Pandey.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.