Monday, July 20, 2009

A Shakespearean Mahabharata with Peter Brook


While I give credit to Peter Brook for managing the difficult task of compressing the essentials of the Mahabharata into a five hour movie, the movie-drama left me desiring a lot more. For a Westerner to make a play out of the Mahabharata was always going to be difficult, and though Brook undoubtedly put in a lot of effort into it, it was far from perfect.

Peter Brook's idea of starring international artists impressed me. Brook's idea was to give the impression that he was not telling the story of just a couple of kingdoms of India, but the story of the entire world. Indeed, the anthropological distribution of India must have been a lot diverse before the 400-800 year span during which the Mahabharata was composed. India must have had a lot of different tribes - Huns, Sakas, Kushanas etc., each with different a physique and a different facial feature. However, having an international cast does have its challenges - some of which Brook made no attempts at overcoming. The least he could have done was to give his actors a short course on Sanskrit pronounciation. In fact, the pronounciation of Indian names was so bad, that at one point of the play, that even the person who wrote the official sub-titles for the DVD wasn't able to understand it - the actor was uttering Bramha's name, while the sub-title read Rama.

We can forgive Peter Brook on the grounds that the primary spectators he was targetting were all Westerners, more used to Brook's Shakespearean productions. Indeed, it hardly seemed like an Indian tale, rather like an attempt at creating a Shakespearean drama. Soliloquis, short and long, filled the play. Amba's apparition to Bhishma reminded one of the Apparition of his father seen by Hamlet. At times, the costume was reminiscent of the Greek tragedies. And indeed, in crafting Karna's character, Brook may have attempted a half-hearted Shakespearan tragedy. While all of the above may be pardonable, what, in my view is unpardonable, was that Brook tried to so much make a Shakespearean play out of the Mahabharata that he even inserted Shakespeare like crude humour into his play. This is something I find completely unjustifiable - Shakespeare had to insert crude humour into his plays for the benefit of the groundlings of the Globe and Blackfrairs, but Brook's receivers are likely to be more educated.

There is some fresh breath in this play, that is a welcome break from the stale air of most of the Indian productions of Mahabharata. The costumes are more simple, less gaudy and more realistic. Most of the battle was dramatized without resort to the bitter-tasting computer graphics. Karna's tragedy is very well highlighted - something many reproductions of the Mahabharata failed to do (especially CR's Mahabharata).

While it is common for directors to take liberty with Shakespeare's plays, whether pardonable or not, hacking and hewing what Shakespeare wrote, bending the plot a little here and there, cutting a few lines there, a scene here, a soliloquy there; such twisting and turning of an epic like the Mahabharata may not be acceptable and may be seen as a cardinal sin. After all, aren't you trying to tell an ancient tale to a Western audience who has never heard it? And if this is the case, then is it not your duty to be factually correct? I was shocked to see that in his play it was Vyasa, and not Vidura (in fact Vidura hadn't been introduced at all - obviously, Brook didn't want to confuse his Western audience with too many characters, and made do with whatever characters he already had), and this is unforgivable.

Another shortcoming of this play was that it failed to depict that the Mahabharata was not just a war between the Kauravas and Pandavas, but it was a war in which the entire Indian nation took part - right from Afghanistan (Gandhara) to Manipur and Burma. I feel that depicting this aspect was very important, as this was something that could have touched a chord in the hearts of the Western audience Brook was targeting, since his audience would have experienced something similar during the first and second world wars. In fact, this book wouldn't be called the Mahabharata (or Great India) if the entire Indian sub-continent hadn't taken part in it. Mahabharata not only tells (allegorically) the political history of India, but also tells the social and economic history, and while Brook covered a part of the political history, covering the socio-economic history in a five hour production was near impossible and he can't be blamed for not covering it.

I liked the way the play ended profoundly referring to the final illusion. Most Indian productions would have saffronized this, but not being trained earlier, allowed Brook to interpret this in a broader sense.
You have known neither paradise nor hell. Here there is no happiness, no punishment, no family, no enemies. Rise in tranquility. This is the last illusion.

Brook's exploitation of the Rabindra Sangeet style of music is also interesting and adds a charm to the production.

There weren't many Indian actors in the production - in fact only one who had a major role - Mallika Sarabhai played Draupadi. Her performance was marked with a couple of brilliant scenes, but the rest of it was mediocre. There were good performances from the characters of Krishna, Duryodhana, Yudhishthira, Arjuna, Gandhari, and Karna (aided by fluent soliloquies, the best of all).

At the end, I'd like to say that it was not a bad attempt, but Brook's Shakespearean legacy let him down. He could have done a lot better, had he not tried to invent a Shakeaspearan drama out of the Mahabharata.

Monday, July 13, 2009

This little froggy took a big leap,
This little froggy took a small,
This little froggy leaped sideways,
And this little froggy not at all,
And this little froggy went,
hippity, hippity, hippity hop, all the way home.

In Bengali, the word for mushroom translates literally to Frog's Umbrella. I remember reading books as a child, with pictures of a frog under a mushroom. The pity is that my children may only see frogs in their alphabet books, as most species of frogs are now critically endangered, and many totally extinct.

In 2007, David Attenborough, shooting for the BBC series "Life in Cold Blood" in 2007, visited the last breeding site of the very beautiful and once abundant golden frog in Panama. Fighting time, the scientists studying the golden frog for years waited for the shooting to complete, before removing the last of the golden frogs from the wild and transporting them to a special facility.

A story that appeared in the National Geographic Magazine in April 2009 really moved me. I will paste verbatim an extract from it which made me really sad:
A slender man with a camper's stubble and a soft demeanor squats at the side of pond number 100, bordered by stoic rock walls and edged with pink mountain heather and tangled grasses. Vance Vredenburg is a biologist at San Francisco State University, and he's been studying the mountain yellow-legged frog for 13 years, slumming in a tent on the mountainside for weeks at a time as he monitors 80 different study lakes. Today, mosquito net balled up around his neck, he contemplates ten dead frogs, stiff-legged, white bellies going soft in the sun.

"It wasn't long ago when you walked along the bank of this pond," he recalls, "a frog leapt at every other step. You'd see hundreds of them alive and well, soaking in the sun in a writhing mass." But in 2005, when the biologist hiked up to his camp anticipating another season of long-term studies, "there were dead frogs everywhere. Frogs I'd been working with for years, that I'd tagged and followed through their lives, all dead. I sat down on the ground and cried."

The rest of the article can be read here.

While man has been partially responsible for this mass extinction of amphibians, which are the most ancient of all back-boned animals, by destroying their habitat, the major contribution to this extinction comes from a fungal infection. The fungus called Chytridiomycosis infects the skin of the frogs, hindering their breathing, and choking them to death (frogs breathe through their skins). The fungus is so potent that it has spread to all continents; more than 170 species have already been wiped out by this fungus; more than 1900 species are on the verge of extinction due to this fungus.

The virus first appeared in the African clawed frogs, which have developed a resistance to the fungus due to the presence of anti-biotic producing pro-biotic bacteria in their skin. In the last few decades, the African clawed frog was transported all over the world in large numbers, which could be one of the reasons for this amphibian epidemic. As most frogs around the world had never been exposed to the fungus, thereby having developed no genetic resistance to the fungus, they quickly succumbed to the fungus. Another theory suggests that the fungus suddenly increased in virulence, which the frogs were unable to cope up with. However, the former argument sounds stronger. Carrying species from one continent to another in jet planes has never been a good idea, and we have seen many times in the past the environmental ramifications of such alien introductions.

Government policies worldwide has helped this mass extinction of the amphibians. A few years ago, there was a massive plan to introduce fish into the pristine fish-less upstream waters of rivers. Trouts were introduced into these fish-less waters by dropping from airplanes (incidentally, many of these missed their mark, leaving fish rotting in the forests). This spelt doom for the frogs. Tadpoles are the primary food of trouts, and these tadpoles in these previously fish-less waters had no reason to develop defenses against fishes, and were consequently quickly eaten.

Some conservationist groups are trying to combat the virus (which, in some areas is spreading as quickly as 25 miles a month), by collecting frogs from the wild, and treating them with anti-fungal medicines. Other efforts are aimed at using the bacteria that protects the African clawed frog against the virus in combating the epidemic, but such research may take a while.

Indeed, the future does seem bleak for these amphibians, which are the oldest land-dwelling vertebrates. These amphibians, which saw the dinosaurs come and go, are facing the worst winter of their existence on the planet, and may not see another spring.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Since everybody is discussing homosexuality these days - reports of gay penguins exercising their right to adopt children and article 377 pottied, flushed and disinfected in everybody's mouth and in everybody's morning newspaper - why should I be left out. After all, I have a metabolic requirement to be cool too - and my blog needs to be more happenning (that, incidentally, was the word a friend used to describe what I was not when I told him that I spend most of my leisure hours at home pressing 'j' on google-reader instead of 'partying'. Well, that wasn't quite the word he used; the word he quite used used was 'socializing').

A few years ago, the news that the first homosexual tigers were observed in the wild, made it to the front page of the Times of India, and it seemed to have a sort of an appeal to wannabe post doctorates of the sort who ran an experiment on fifty or so couples feeding the husbands different diets on different weeks, and feeding the wives the resulting cum, and doing a regression line analysis plotting the taste of food of the men on the X-axis, and the taste of food (oopsie!) of the females on the Y-axis. (You may not believe me, and might like to check on this yourself, but it was a research project conducted by some university somewhere).

Tigers are mostly solitary creatures, and the chances of one of them finding a fuck may be small given their current population - thanks to project tiger and Chinese medicines - providing me enough justification to undermine the hullabaloo over Columbus' discovery of gay tigers.

A more recent non-human homosexual observation was made on a gay penguin couple. (Oopsie! Apologies. Blame that on an unconscious grammatical error, without any ill feeling towards the observer. The Corrected sentence should read something like, "Human observation of non-human homosexuals, aka gay penguins). BTW, just in case you are wondering if this has anything to do with 8mm films, they didn't go through the American Board of Film Certification to get themselves 13X rated. What made it even more interesting that the gay penguin couple adopted and raised a penguin chick.

Jokes aside, what is extraordinary about this incident is that these gay penguins shouldn't have had any difficulty in finding a mate of the other sex who was ready to copulate with them. Why, then, did they choose to remain gay?

I haven't been able to find the answer to this question, and I doubt if scientists have. But is this the only question to be answered? There are a couple more. Is homosexuality a product of the mind - a mere matter of taste (acquired or otherwise), or does it have a deeper genetic root? And if it does have a, either partial or total, genetic root, is it a wide-spread phenomena that happened throughout the history of higher animals to a certain percentage of the population, or was it always a stray phenomena arising out of genetic aberrations, which were to be soon eliminated out by natural selection?

Perhaps a clue might lie in this question. Is homosexuality totally meaningless in creatures in which fertilization is external, rather than internal? Have the plants, frogs or coral polyps found any parallels of the homosexuality which has been observed in us mammals, which we are yet to observe, recognize or understand?