...and sunshine follows the rain

Play: …And sunshine follows the rain. Inspired by Tennessee Williams’ “A Glass Menagerie”

The play was about fifty thousand years in the life of an Anglo-Indian family in post Independence India, not knowing which way to run in a country not run by the British. And that’s where the promise of a good play ends. The story goes something like this: (oh, by the way, I’m not scared of spoiling it for you or anything…there isn’t anything in the damn play to reveal…)

The father was a boozehound, and long before the play starts, the bugger just upped and left. Ran away to Australia or some place…the family lives on, starring one gossiping mother, one crippled daughter, and one son who wants to find his place under the sun, but can’t, since he has a bloody family to support…so far, so good…but for some strange, utterly inexplicable reason, the playwright decided to have more than one actors play the role of each character…which brings us to three goddamn people playing the son, and two each for the mother and daughter…yours truly spent the better part of two hours trying to figure out just why the heck does that symbolize, and I just couldn’t figure the bugger out…

Which brings me to two very simple words…those words are content and form. Or, in simpler words, “what do you want to say?” and “how do you want to say it”. It’s a very simple deal, really. A reason why a bugger puts up a blog, or writes in a paper, or makes a movie, or…you get the drift. Anyways, its coz he’s got something to say which he feels somebody might find interesting. Great, so our imaginary person’s got something to say, now the next question before him is this: what would be the best way to present his idea? Now this is the tricky part, coz this can either make or break your idea…take the latest episode of Munnabhai, for example. The idea was to introduce Gandhi to a generation who has no idea what he was all about. And what better way to do so than the method employed in the film? Its funny, its compact, and hence appeals to its viewers. The form and the content are always complementary. On the basis of the content only can a form be chosen. On the opposite end of the spectrum, this play makes a mockery of itself. When the content of the play did not require the form of more than one person playing a character, why the hell did he do it?

I’ll leave the bad play at that…

The Little Prince

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Genre: Children’s fiction

Surprised I'm writing about a children’s novel? Well, ‘The Little Prince’ isn’t just any children’s book. Its about a little child who comes from a planet hardly bigger than himself, and who leaves it to see the Universe…and in the course of his travels comes in contact, for the first time, with the crazy world of the adults.

He meets a King, whose subjects consists of an old mouse…and that’s about it. To exercise his authority, he condemns the mouse to death. But since that would mean having no subjects to rule over, he exercises his authority once again to pardon him. And does that again, and again, and again…

Or with the rule-obsessed lamplighter, who’s job was to light the lamp in the evenings and extinguish it in the morning. The rest of the day was for relaxation, and the night for sleeping. But as time went by, his planet started rotating quicker and quicker, and yet the orders didn’t change. So he switches the lamp on every thirty seconds, and switches it off in another thirty!

Earth is a different deal altogether…populated by two billion adults, it’s a lot crazier than all the planets he’s been to so far, put together. There a lot more people living repetitive lives, lives with no meaning, than anywhere else you can find. The author, as a child, was an artist with a flair for drawing boa constrictors digesting elephants from the outside and the inside. But now he is a man of facts and figures, of action and responsibility. In other words, he has become an adult.

In the course of his travels, the Little Prince comes to the Earth. Here, he meets the author stranded in the middle of the desert, and asks him to draw him a sheep…and that’s how their friendship starts.

Each day the author learns a little more of the The Little Prince’s world…the love of his life, the aforementioned flower, who thinks she can save herself from tigers with her four thorns, and who asks the Prince to put a glass globe over her head since she’s allergic to draughts. How the Prince knew that he was being taken for a ride, but let himself be hoodwinked…he didn’t want to hurt the flower’s feelings, you see? Or how his planet is so small, that he just has to move his chair a few feet if he wants to watch the sunset, which he loves to watch when he is very sad…or the baobab seeds which are blown onto his planet…baobabs are dangerous things, capable of completely destroying the planet they grow on…or the…

The Little Prince attempts the impossible: trying to make sense of the inane world which the grown-ups of the world have created for themselves, and explain this to a child. And at the same time, it reminds grown-ups of their own follies: of forgetting their own childhood. It finally treats children as being capable of accepting all natural things, even death, with no lasting effect on them. “The adults are the ones who give them wrongful attitudes, who distort their notions of the natural. I don’t believe that death has to be morbid. No child is going to be upset by the going of the little prince. It’s just a part things as they are.” (from Saint-Exupery in America)

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill Enid Blyton children’s book, as you probably gathered by now. It is a book for children and adults alike, to read again and again, and discover more and more hidden meanings each and every time. If you haven’t read this book yet, go read it…if you have, read it again.

As the Little Prince would say, “From where I come from, everything is very small…” True, my young friend…very true. But ultimately, the smallest things matter the most in life, don’t they?