Small Talk with Ojas Suniti Vijay The torchbearer Actor Ojas Suniti Vijay infuses fire in her performance depicting the will of Irom Sharmila and the alienation of the Northeast from the rest of India<http://cms.mumbaimirror.com/ads.aspx?adid=4>
Jyoti Punwani Posted On Sunday, December 12, 2010 at 03:04:51 AM Irom Sharmila came to Mumbai on December 10, Human Rights Day, and forced us to support her 10-year-old hunger strike. Nasal drip in place, she narrated what it means to be a Manipuri woman living under the rule of a law peculiar to Manipur - and all seven sisters of Northeast India <http://cms.mumbaimirror.com/ads.aspx?adid=4>. And Kashmir. “Four million people live under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA),’’ points out Ojas Suniti Vijay, the 25-year-old who plays Sharmila in the play Le Mashale (bearing torches). “If you want the world to acknowledge you as the world’s largest democracy, this law has to be repealed.’’ Ojas Suniti Vijay started teaching bio diversity, but missed theatre too much In the solo performance, Ojas/ Sharmila spells out the army’s point-of-view of Manipuri women: “Just a piece of flesh with two round breasts and a vagina.’’ She repeats this sentence as she depicts the rape and mutilation of Manorama Devi, who was dragged from her home by soldiers of the Assam Rifles in 2004. She was later found dead, shot through her vagina. The act provoked a protest unique in India<http://cms.mumbaimirror.com/ads.aspx?adid=4> - Manipuri mothers stood naked in front of the gate of the Assam Rifles Battalion in Imphal, with a banner stating, ‘Indian army rape us.’ This picture is shown through the enactment of Le Mashale. “The nakedness of the women showed the army as being completely naked,’’ says Ojas. There are other visuals - grabs from the Internet - that flash across the screen towards the end of this dance-drama: soldiers forcing Manipuri boys to beat each other with lathis and turn cartwheels on the road. But these would remain fleeting images were they not matched by the intensity of Ojas/Sharmila’s frustration, anger, and sense of nostalgia for a Manipur where grandmothers related stories of how Manipur’s seven suns were vanquished so that the people could finally get darkness and sleep and love. But the night so longed-for has turned out to be endless after the AFSPA was imposed on Manipur in 1958. Ojas, a Maharashtrian, says, “It’s important that someone from mainland India <http://cms.mumbaimirror.com/ads.aspx?adid=4> is doing this play (written by Malayalam writer Civic Chandran).” A Pune girl born to activist parents (members of the National Alliance of People’s Movements), who named her as they named themselves - with the mother’s and father’s name substituting for the surname, told her to take a year off after her graduation to find out what she wanted to do. Ojas travelled to Uttarakhand and Scotland, and came back to her base to do a post-graduation in bio-diversity, a course in which you spend more time outside the classroom than inside. She taught it for one semester, but found she missed theatre too much. The subject never left her though, through the many journeys across the country. “On every street, ever journey, you meet people with different body languages. There are so many stories waiting to be told, and hardly a fraction have been depicted. That’s why I don’t agree with those who say theatre is dead. It’s the last thing to die. It’s been there since the Mahabharat, when Krishna organised a show for the victorious Pandavas. The play narrated the events of the war they had just won, and showed them the massacre that had brought them their crown. That’s the impact theatre has - it becomes a mirror. Can the role of a mirror ever end?” Le Mashale holds up a mirror to many things we hold dear. The national anthem, for instance, which has no mention of Manipur, or indeed, of the Northeast. “I grew up like any middle class child, imbibing ideas of the national anthem and rashtrabhasha. But I want my theatre to create a debate, to make people think about nationalism, not merely observe it as a ritual.” Ojas met Sharmila last month when the tenth anniversary of the latter’s fast was being observed. That fleeting, silent meeting in which Ojas handed her a candle across a barricade, now lights up her performances. A clip of naked Manipuri mothers protesting the rape and mutilation of Manorama Devi in Imphal is shown throughout the enactment of Le Mashale http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/82/201012122010121203045163590313ff/The-torchbearer.html -- Adv Kamayani Bali Mahabal +919820749204 skype-lawyercumactivist The UID project is going to do almost exactly the same thing which the predecessors of Hitler did, else how is it that Germany always had the lists of Jewish names even prior to the arrival of the Nazis? The Nazis got these lists with the help of IBM which was in the 'census' business that included racial census that entailed not only count the Jews but also identifying them. At the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, there is an exhibit of an IBM Hollerith D-11 card sorting machine that was responsible for organising the census of 1933 that first identified the Jews. *SAY NO TO UID CAMPAIGN- SPREAD THE WORD AND JOIN FB GROUP* *http://aadhararticles.blogspot.com/ http://questioningaadhaar.blogspot.com/* http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists?p=B67A798223F96E73 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "humanrights movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/humanrights-movement?hl=en.
