Baba black sheep

I am not sure what was the best part - the stairs in the peak of winter where we sat a million nights staring at the stars, pretending to be a group of thoughtful smokers, or the week of frenzied preparation just before the festival,the late night rehearsals with the varied contents of Baba's hipflask keeping us warm and in giggly moods! Do you remember the night the rehearsal went off exceptionally well (it was always so hard to please baba & I think for most of us having him applaud was more important than the Best performer awards - which we always won :P) & a mouse came out of the broken wooden panelling to see what we were upto! And the nights of our endless what-did-we-call-them, was it round table meetings??? Nah can't be that - but it was some pseudo official sounding name where all we did was bitch about each other!

One thing I have to thank Adil for (I take back "you remind me of Saboo") was introducing me to the group. I was scared shitless the first day - I mean I had never stood on a stage before and here I was being asked to yell out my introductions loud enough for the whole audi to hear.. and then to moan and whimper in front of a audience of 1000 in AIIMS! That was some crazy adrenalin rush tho - would go back in time just for that feeling once more. Ofcourse the sciency types did not appreciate the play at all (HEHEHE that gave us some perverse thrill that we were smarter than all of them even the judges!). Can't really blame them - it was an "experimental" play (Howard Brenton's Gum & Goo) with the most deliberately insensitive handling of the issue of autism & gender play. All that got the AIIMs audience excited was my moaning (while I transformed from a normal teenager to an autistic child) and as one illustrious young smartass yelled out "Larhka hua ya larhki"... well, each to their own! Incidentally our third co-actor has become a (big?) Tamil movie actor now!!

Apart from all the vices, I hold the group responsible for introducing me to so many types of people who (at the risk of sounding snobbish) I would never have willingly spoken to otherwise. And ultimately almost all 40 of them ended up becoming pretty good friends - I guess theatre does that to you. If you spend 24x7 on each other's face, eating drinking sleeping crying laughing together - it's bound to make you closer.

Well those were my 30 seconds of fame! Now back to being a boring PhD student BLAGHH