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.
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.
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