Ok Tata Bye Bye

Women On The Verge

Purva Naresh’s Ok Tata Bye Bye, directed by Rabijita Gogoi (part of the Writer’s Bloc Festival) speaks in a brave female voice that challenges socially accepted gender equations.

A pair of filmmakers (Ahlam Khan Karachiwala-Jim Sarbh) come to a North Indian village to make a documentary on a caste that initiates its women into prostitution. Settled next to the highway, they cater mainly to the transient trucker population.

Seema (Prerna Chawla—brilliant), the bright, chatty young woman they hope to make the focus of their film, takes them on a merry ride, but by the end of it, she questions the middle-class city assumptions about her chosen line of work, about female empowerment and sex as a bargaining force between men and women.  According to Seema, she has a better life than many of the married women of her class, and certainly better than the tentative, no-name, no-commitment relationship between the filmmaker and her white boyfriend.  “We are same to same,” Seema insists and dares anyone to contradict her. The NGOs who tell her to give up her profession for the sake of self-respect get a tongue-lashing too.

Even if the play overlooks the child abuse and exploitation angle of the flesh trade, Purva creates characters like Seema and her more manipulative friend (Nishi Doshi), who know what they want and despite all the odds their low caste, poverty and lack of adequate education places before them, they reach their goals.

The language is colourful, the interactions between the women and the cheerful truck driver (Gagan Riar) caught in the battle not of his choosing, open and piquant. The audience probably emerges with some of their ideas of morality a bit shaken.

Pereira’s Bakery at 76 Chapel Road

Ode to the City


For those who grew up around the predominantly Catholic settlements of Bandra and Santacruz (in  Mumbai), Ayeesha Menon’s Pereira’s Bakery at 76 Chapel Road is like a shot of pure nostalgia.
Over the years, the fairytale cottages and close-knit communities have given way to impersonal highrises, and even though the Pereiras and their neighbours are fighting a losing battle, you root for them. Hidayat Sami plays Pereira with a straight-backed dignity that also seems to have been lost when the landscape of these areas changed.

In Menon’s evocative play (part of the Writers’ Bloc Festival), directed by Zafar Khan Karachiwala, Vincent Pereira, his wife (Deepika Amin), daughter Annie (Ahlam Khan Karachiwala) and neighbours try to stand up to the might of the builders, who want to demolish their home to build a car park for the large shopping mall coming up on the neighbouring plot. The sounds of drilling and hammering of new constructions punctuate their day.

Menon has created her characters lovingly and without turning them into broad caricatures.  The crabby, sharp-tongued Pinto (Darius Shroff is a revelation!), the deaf old Colonel (Sohrab Ardeshir), an Indian Idol aspirant (Nisha Lalvani) and her mother (Tahira Nath). They speak in the lilting tones of old Bandra and treat each other as family.  All this is about to end, and there is no help forthcoming – neither from the media, nor NGOs or community groups. The bakery with its traditional recipes handed down from father to son, is also losing out to mass-produced chain food stores.

The drama of love, betrayal and breaking of bonds is played out on fabulous set of a crumbling old tenement.  Many in theaudience admitted to have been moved to tears.