Watch CHILLU, our theatrical offering at Narada Gana Sabha, Chennai on 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th of September 2015
CHILLU commenced as a short story.
Late ‘Sujatha’ (Rangarajan), the doyen of modern writing in Tamil and my mentor, phoned up one day long ago. His telephonic conversations were remarkably brief and scintillating and this one too was so.
‘Send a SciFi in Tamil before Friday by email with the text in a TSCII font. P’haps your first e-published story’.
He was then the honorary editor of an Emagazine, Ambalam and had in the previous week’s issue of Ambalam, written a science fiction – short story. He was keen to provide the SciFi genre a prime space in the magazine and wanted creative contribution from other writers as well. The first one to be called to do so, it appears, was me. And the delivery window was quite narrow – within two days I had to email him my story.
‘Thy will be done, sir’. I hung up and started developing a theme I had been thinking about for quite some time then, biochips. After two rounds of tight editing, the script was an extended short story or novella and in that form it was published in Ambalam.
When I sat with Shraddha Theatres veterans Shivaji sir and TDS sir a couple of years ago (Sep 2013 to be precise) to discuss a new presentation under the aegis of Shraddha, I gave them two sets of narratives – a social ‘CHAAVADI” set in 1914 during Emden bombing of Madras and the second, a compendium of three short plays based on my short stories. For the second choice, temptingly titled as ‘Yesterday – Today – Tomorrow’, CHILLU formed the ‘tomorrow’ component, quite naturally, based on its futuristic mooring.
Due to paucity of time to hit the stage, we could not proceed with CHILLU for the ‘Y-S-T’ package and CHILLU was substituted with Ezhuththu-k-kaarar, a monologue driven short play.
When I met Dheepa Ramanujam, we as of on cue instantaneously started discussing CHILLU and CHAAVADI and were both enthusiastic in adopting both these works for stage as full fledged theatrical productions. Here CHILLU took precedence and was soon on the anvil (as early as July 2015).
I and Dheepa observed a humanoid appearing for a fleeting moment in Scene 2 of CHILLU has the potential of blossoming into a full fledged character and playfully cataloged what all could be accomplished with the humanoid.
And thus the script of CHILLU, the theatrical production and Adipodi the humanoid evolved.
(Abhishek Joseph plays Adipodi in CHILLU, the theatrical play)
You can meet Adipodi when the curtains go up for CHILLU on 10th September at Naradha Gana Sabha, Chennai.
And coming to the coda of this write up –
Homage to Sujatha sir, without whose encouragement and guidance in personal life.and writing, I would not have achieved anything, however big or small.
