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METROSCAPE
Playing With Germs
It was a simple story. A man eats at a dirty
café and contracts all kinds of ailments. "If the plot was
any more complicated, people would not understand," says Thejas Mohan,
who directed the play about bacteria at the Science Drama Festival in
Kolkata last week. Each of the eight schools participating in the National
Council for Science Museums (NCSM)-hosted event faced the same problem.
Their production had to have a science theme, but not be too textbookish.
So there was a Kolkata school doing the life of misunderstood astronomer
Giordano Bruno, a Gwalior school picked superstitions, while a school
from Gujarat put up a show on the planetary system.
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| SCIENCE
ON A SPIN: Bacteria (above left) by students from Calicut and
The World of planets by a team from Valsad |
"Drama is the most active medium for unders-
tanding science," says NCSM Director-General Ingit K. Mukherjee.
"But it's difficult and there aren't enough plays related to science.
Hopefully, the drama fest will encourage the writing of more plays on
the subject." To their credit, the schools-they had already been
screened through regional rounds-did a wonderful job with costumes and
props. In Bacteria, three Class VIII students actually bodypainted zebra
stripes to become germs. In the play about Bruno, the middle-school actors
adopted theatre techniques that would do professionals proud. "I've
studied about Galileo and Copernicus, not about Bruno," a youngster
later commented. "It's good to learn new things." Certainly
a fun way to do it.
— Labonita Ghosh
 TWO
TO A TUNE: Sitar player Shubhendra Rao, 36, a worthy disciple of Pandit
Ravi Shankar, and Dutch cellist Saskia de Haas, 30, an equally deserving
student of Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia, met and without much hesitation
got married about six years ago. Now they have made it a habit to play
together in a curious coalescence of cello and sitar. Last week at the
Indian Institute of Science campus in Bangalore the two gave a calming
duet specially composed against the backdrop of the American crisis. The
American Prez needs to hear this one.
— Stephen David
 THE
FINAL LOOK: Singer Anamika was for cocktails, the heady stuff came
later when the likes of Madhu Sapre and Noyonika Chatterjee swaggered
down the ramp in twosomes flaunting "Urban Fusion" creations
by 10 young designers-mostly niftians. At the Smirnoff International Fashion
Awards 2001 (north zone finals) held at Unitech Country Club in Gurgaon,
Richa Risbud and Nitin Bal Chauhan (below) scored over fellow designers
with their use of scrunchies, reels, paper and denim to create "resourceful"
couture. But apart from Tarun Tahiliani and Meher Jessia, Delhi's regular
hedonists were conspicuous by their absence. The cheering, or rather lack
of it, came from the motley crowd of club members and fashion students.
The organisers didn't look terribly pleased. Nothing to do with the fashion
fledglings, of course.
—Mridula Chettri Singh
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