Karandak Konacha!!
Soham Gadgil
TY BSc Economics (2022-25)
Hi, I am the guy you’ll see every semester spending the first one and a half months in the Student Activities Room rather than lectures. These first few days of the semester, I spent all my time with the same people talking about the same story, script, scenes, and dialogue till every person around us knew every second of the play by heart. On the occasion of the 75th edition of our 810 Newsletter, let me tell you a little journey about the theatre club of GIPE. It is a small journey, to be honest, but very unexpected to say the least.
There is no point in explaining what Purushottam Karandak and Firodiya Karandak are, as the people who will read this article will mostly know. Still, for those who don’t – these are two prestigious intercollegiate theatre competitions of Pune that have been taking place for over fifty years. Purushottam Karandak is purely focused on theatre while Firodiya Karandak describes itself as ‘Cinema on Stage’, an amalgamation of dance, art, theatre, and live music to tell a story. Since 2022, directors and writers aged about 20 years old have been coming up with different scripts and concepts, each one more unique than the last, to present in front of large audiences.
Firodiya Karandak 2024
Every year, around thirty to forty people take part in this process, they spend all their time together for one and a half months creating memories for themselves. Everyone goes to describe it as one of the best times of their lives and the rest of the year is spent reminiscing about these few days. Many participants have tried to put this experience into words but all of us have ended up just reporting the events as if we were journalists, none of us were able to capture the emotion, or the feeling, or put into words why it means so much to us. Honestly, as having experienced this before I don’t think it is possible to describe everything that happens during that period. So instead of just reporting what happens or rambling on about how I feel or the team feels during these processes, I decided to write about a few rituals we follow and give you a small glimpse of what exactly Firodiya and Purushottam are.
Worshipping the Script – Koi Aur Jahaan – Firodiya 2024
In multiple Indian cultures, people worship specific deities to celebrate new beginnings, especially the god Ganesha as he is considered the god of beginnings, remover of obstacles, and bringer of good luck, he is also considered the patron of arts and sciences being the natural choice. Although, for atheists, it seems difficult to pray to something they don’t believe in, for those people, I can clearly say that this is not just worshipping a Ganesha idol kept on the table. The puja is for the script that you will devote yourselves to for the next few months and spend every moment of your day thinking about how you can present it on stage, how you can convey to the audience that you have written in words, and how will your message and thought process reach everyone who watches you perform. The best explanation of why we worship the script would be that it is the only thing that comes close to the existence of a godly being in our lives. People around the world worship God with all their devotion, effort, time, and all this without questioning his or her existence. A theatre script is somewhat similar. You spend time and effort bringing it to life, devote your thoughts and thinking to it, and you don’t have to question its existence as you can hold it close to your heart with your own hands. A few students show the same devotion to this script as thousands of people do to different deities around the world, so this piece of paper deserves the same kind of worship as these deities.
Not all rituals are this serious or this systematic, there is one ritual that started because of all the foodies in the team. It started with talking about different spots to eat, which is essential as you spend the whole day in an institute with a virtually non-existent canteen. Throughout the month we explore all these options, use Zomato Gold and Swiggy One to the full extent, all the IMDR and Aamaya people know who we are, and even the chai-wala at BMCC keeps the parcel ready for us every day at 4:30 pm. We pride ourselves in creating foodies out of peer pressure and finding new spots to eat, one day someone will bring food they cooked at home or someday the director’s parents will bring food to lift everyone’s spirits. The whole team tends to use food to chill out in stressful situations and it always helps.
Although, our true love for food is not what we eat but when and how we eat, it is more about having that experience together. Especially, after the day of the performance, everyone comes home to the hall, dumps all equipment and lies down wherever they find space. Everyone spends about an hour or two roasting our performance, talking, laughing, and just trying our best to not cry. In these moments, we switch our conversation about what to do for dinner, because none of us have eaten for more than eight hours, but no one is hungry either. Everyone is too invested in the fact that they have given it their all. Maybe there are a few regrets, a few thoughts about what the result will be, and a few people are still invested in the audience’s reactions. Every member of the team is experiencing something very different at that moment, and to bring everyone together again, we sit in a circle and start discussing what to eat. This ritual seems too simple, it is just a dinner after our performance, nothing too deep, but for us, it is much more than a simple dinner. This dinner is an escape from the thoughts related to mistakes in our performance, audience reactions, feedback, and everything that could overwhelm us. We cry tears of joy and sadness after our performance, in moments we already know that even if we gave our hundred per cent, it didn’t reach the judges or there were moments to regret. So this dinner has two objectives, first is not letting our body die from exhaustion, and second is to just escape all these thoughts going on in our brain and maybe enjoy with this bunch of people for the last time.
The Candle Narration – Room 101 – 29th August 2024 – One Day before Purushottam Karandak 2024
The day before the performance is the most difficult one, you don’t know how to practice because you don’t want the team to be exhausted. You are a nervous wreck but at the same time, you are trying to be mature and serious about the upcoming performance. The whole day you spend polishing the final acts, revising dialogues and steps, wrapping up the set, and buying all the final equipment you need and then comes a time when everything is done and you sit looking towards the empty stage in the hall hoping that the performance will go as you imagined. In such a situation there is one last thing that we do. Every team member takes a candle and chooses their favourite spot in the practice hall, puts the candle there and sits beside it. Then we have a narrator, who tells a story of the last one and a half months as if it is someone else’s story. Everyone closes their eyes and listens to the narrator tell their own story, the highs, the achievements, the firsts, the fights, the stress, everything goes through their minds once more, they relive all of this. Once the narration is over, everyone opens their eyes and looks at the melted candle.
The narrator tells them that the candle that is already melted represents the energy they have already spent in this process, and the candle that remains is the energy they will put in on the day of the performance, leaving everything they have out there and making yourself and everyone around you proud. The flame represents your hope, the hope to send out a message, the hope to share a story, the hope to reach an audience and leave a part of you out there on the stage. Then the narrator says, that if you want you can get up and leave, or you can sit near the candle as long as you want. The first time I did this activity, I thought everyone would get up and leave because everyone was tired but no one did. All the team members stayed near the candle, their eyes closed, a few people cried their eyes out and I tried to console them, and even when I did, I had no idea the impact this candle narration had. It is these moments where you realise how much this process means to people, everyone sacrifices a lot to be a part of this and the narration, the story reminds them of the things they have experienced.
Last but not least, a ritual right before we step on stage, is the song. Every process has a dedicated song, a song that when played for the first time confuses people but when you play it for the last time, the whole team sings their hearts out. The team chooses a song at the start of the process, a song with lyrics either related to our story or to the effort everyone puts in and before every practice, we stand in a circle, hold each other’s hands, close our eyes and listen to this song. We listen to it every day, it is one of the constants of the process. At the start we try to find our favourite parts of the song, then in the middle stages we start singing and enjoying with the team and towards the end, the song becomes too emotional. We sing our hearts out by the end, we clench each other’s hands, and at the end have group hugs, and we cry, we cry our hearts out and no one can answer why. It just becomes too overwhelming for us, all the emotions, all the feelings, and all our expression comes together during this one song. We can never listen to it again without feeling emotional, a song we never knew before turns into a background track of our story. Khudi, by the Local Train, was the song for our most recent Purushottam process and Life is Crazy from Wake Up Sid was the song for the Firodiya process. Life is Crazy was chosen as the song because there is a saying that people who do theatre are called crazy because they think about the same scene, same moment, and same dialogue for many hours to get it perfect. The song Khudi, had a line, “Khudi ko khud se milane, chala hai oh diwane”, which translates to, “I am leaving, to meet myself”, a message related to our script.
The Purushottam Karandak 2024 Team
These rituals might seem unnecessary but these rituals are all directed towards building a team. We spend so much time doing the same activities, the only factor that gets us through all of this is these rituals that we do as a team. Regardless of all beliefs, a group of people devotes themselves to this effort to just create something of their own. This year, a group of forty people will try once again to represent GIPE to the best of its abilities, with another story. All the theatre people in GIPE’s Theatre Club today hope to leave an impact and legacy behind. They want to leave stories behind that will keep inspiring the new students to keep this effort going. Because all of us have created our best memories in these processes we would want everyone to find their own thing in their college lives. Of course, none of us know if these two competitions will continue in the institute, but I hope we as a group immortalise an era of the theatre club of the BSc GIPE program.
The Purushottam Karandak 2024 Team right before the performance in the green room