Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others.
The eldest of three boys, I was born in a small town called Changanacherry in Kerala.
My childhood was spent in Kanpur, a city in Uttar Pradesh and in 1983 I moved to Bangalore along with my father's parents. My school life was fairly uneventful, except for the growing suspicion that I was not meant to last long in an institutionalised environment.
In 1991, I began my journey into the world of theatre as a stage-hand - operating curtains, arranging furniture, organising the props, and eventually as a lighting operator. This formed a turning point in my career, it was also a tumultuous period comprised of sleepless nights, drowsy days, miles of tarmac, meeting and working with all kinds of people, and great food. It was amidst all this that I began to learn the basics of lighting technology and its aesthetic aspects, and I metamorphosed into a lighting designer. As time went by, my experience and capabilities in the field grew and so did the distance between me and theatre. I began to take on lighting assignments for commercial events, mainly because there was no money to be earned in theatre those days. I lit jam bottles, multi-utility vehicles, fashion shows, discotheques, award ceremonies... almost everything you can possibly imagine.
A stark hopelessness of my work struck hard during my engagement with 'The Femina Ms. India' show in 2000, the year that Lara Dutta won the mantle - I must clarify that feeling was in no way connected with Ms. Dutta winning the contest. I decided to reduce my work in the field of lighting, a decision prompted more by fatigue than valour. I increasingly began to devote time to rafiki, the theatre group that I co-founded with two friends Preetam Koilpillai and Dominic Taylor in 1996.
My work with rafiki helped in meeting and training with practitioners, such as Hartman de Souza, Probir Guha, Raja Ravivarma, Natalie Hennedige, Gracias Devaraj, Kanan Kumar, Anamika Haksar, Christoph Lechner, Michel Casanovas, to name a few. My own training deepened with forms like Devarattam, Silambattam, and Tai Chi Qigong. In 2005 I began a journey into Vipassana.
Over the years, I have had the good fortune to engage with some of the most creative theatre directors in the country, such as Anmol Vellani (Toto Funds the Arts) and Rajiv Krishnan (PERCH), Abhijit Sengupta (Theatre Club), and S. Surendranath (Sanket).
In 2013, my journey with rafiki came to a close, around the same time I began traveling with Koogu, a solo performance that completed in 2016 after 108 performances in various places and spaces. 2017 witnessed a collaboration with Maraa, a media and arts collective to realise Unreserved, a theatre based project on identity, involving people and organisations from Karnataka, Assam, Kashmir and Kerala, and travelling over 10,000 kilometres in the long distance trains of India.
As 2019 segued into the new decade, I have joined a team of people engaged in a unique endeavour called Disom — The Leadership School that hopes to forge and nurture political leadership in India. This work, germinated in Initiatives of Change in Panchgani.
The Covid years went by with a lot of travel, personal losses, discoveries... In 2023, my work with Sense Kaleidoscopes, an institution that works with people on the autism spectrum, moves deeper with a theatre programme that aims to grow into a theatre curriculum for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I continue my performance journey with two new pieces of work. One is called iha, (a Kannada word that roughly translates to 'as of this moment') which is being imagined as a wandering with the songs of Shishunala Sharifa, a 19th century poet-saint of Karnataka. The second is called 'Shuffle', a solo (currently being built) that employs elements of theatre and cardistry to explore the themes of human conception, suicide, and the notion of choices.
My childhood was spent in Kanpur, a city in Uttar Pradesh and in 1983 I moved to Bangalore along with my father's parents. My school life was fairly uneventful, except for the growing suspicion that I was not meant to last long in an institutionalised environment.
In 1991, I began my journey into the world of theatre as a stage-hand - operating curtains, arranging furniture, organising the props, and eventually as a lighting operator. This formed a turning point in my career, it was also a tumultuous period comprised of sleepless nights, drowsy days, miles of tarmac, meeting and working with all kinds of people, and great food. It was amidst all this that I began to learn the basics of lighting technology and its aesthetic aspects, and I metamorphosed into a lighting designer. As time went by, my experience and capabilities in the field grew and so did the distance between me and theatre. I began to take on lighting assignments for commercial events, mainly because there was no money to be earned in theatre those days. I lit jam bottles, multi-utility vehicles, fashion shows, discotheques, award ceremonies... almost everything you can possibly imagine.
A stark hopelessness of my work struck hard during my engagement with 'The Femina Ms. India' show in 2000, the year that Lara Dutta won the mantle - I must clarify that feeling was in no way connected with Ms. Dutta winning the contest. I decided to reduce my work in the field of lighting, a decision prompted more by fatigue than valour. I increasingly began to devote time to rafiki, the theatre group that I co-founded with two friends Preetam Koilpillai and Dominic Taylor in 1996.
My work with rafiki helped in meeting and training with practitioners, such as Hartman de Souza, Probir Guha, Raja Ravivarma, Natalie Hennedige, Gracias Devaraj, Kanan Kumar, Anamika Haksar, Christoph Lechner, Michel Casanovas, to name a few. My own training deepened with forms like Devarattam, Silambattam, and Tai Chi Qigong. In 2005 I began a journey into Vipassana.
Over the years, I have had the good fortune to engage with some of the most creative theatre directors in the country, such as Anmol Vellani (Toto Funds the Arts) and Rajiv Krishnan (PERCH), Abhijit Sengupta (Theatre Club), and S. Surendranath (Sanket).
In 2013, my journey with rafiki came to a close, around the same time I began traveling with Koogu, a solo performance that completed in 2016 after 108 performances in various places and spaces. 2017 witnessed a collaboration with Maraa, a media and arts collective to realise Unreserved, a theatre based project on identity, involving people and organisations from Karnataka, Assam, Kashmir and Kerala, and travelling over 10,000 kilometres in the long distance trains of India.
As 2019 segued into the new decade, I have joined a team of people engaged in a unique endeavour called Disom — The Leadership School that hopes to forge and nurture political leadership in India. This work, germinated in Initiatives of Change in Panchgani.
The Covid years went by with a lot of travel, personal losses, discoveries... In 2023, my work with Sense Kaleidoscopes, an institution that works with people on the autism spectrum, moves deeper with a theatre programme that aims to grow into a theatre curriculum for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I continue my performance journey with two new pieces of work. One is called iha, (a Kannada word that roughly translates to 'as of this moment') which is being imagined as a wandering with the songs of Shishunala Sharifa, a 19th century poet-saint of Karnataka. The second is called 'Shuffle', a solo (currently being built) that employs elements of theatre and cardistry to explore the themes of human conception, suicide, and the notion of choices.
