The power of Baa

PIYUSH BHATT on Vipul Vyas’s new Gujarati play

50 years ago to the day, a very young impressionable boy watched his mum and dad celebrate the birth of a vibrant Indian state called Gujarat.

This year that very same boy, now a self made artiste, produced and directed a Gujarati play that his parents would have been proud of.

Vipul Vyas’ Mahavira Productions staged the play Baa Bagade To Baar Vagade at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta to a packed audience of 700, on 1 May 2010.

Vipul himself starred in a major role.

In brief, the play was about a housewife (Manisha Vyas as Baa) in Mumbai, who selflessly gives up an active life of acting, sports etc to devote to her family. Today her adult children do not need her except to cook, clean, look after the baby and be at their beck and call. Her husband (Vipul Vyas as Avinash) is too busy in his business and demonstrates a typical chauvinistic attitude to his wife. He is too willing to compare her to his friends’ ‘with it’ wives but does not encourage her from her domestic environment. It’s like sitting on her back and then criticising her for not walking, dressing or talking the same way as the women in his social circle. Her stoic character gives her the inner strength to emotionally support the family and look after the day-to-day workings within the household – cooking, cleaning, ironing and being every one’s domestic football including the son (Hemal Joshi as Suketu) daughter-in law (Ruchi Bakshi as Siddhi) and the daughter (Mecki Ansari as Ketki).

A young teenage grandson (Karan Rao as Vinay) from Australia arrives, and though his innocent eye questions each family member as to their behaviour. (Karan’s Australian Gujarati accent and use of grammar, resonated with most of our Gujarati households in Australia).

The play then takes an unexpected turn though the machinations of the now not-so-innocent grandson. The long suffering housewife rediscovers her old confidence, and a long lost school friend (Nikhil Joshi as Chakudo) who conveniently happens to be a big time advertising agent - and the rest is destiny, as they say.

The play might have been too un-real in how the family takes the dutiful wife/mum/mother-in-law for granted, yet every one in the audience could have related to some or other incident depicted in the play. It hit the right nerve.

The clever use of the double entendres - a trade mark of Vipul’s plays - kept the audience entertained whilst at the same time sending a serious message of how we take our nearest and dearest for granted. There are too many lines to quote but messages like “It is in words must have swelled the hearts of the audience. A statistic not well-known but worth including is that the Gujarat economy has been growing at an average of 12% pa for the last 12 years putting it in the same league as China’s growth. Gujarat accounts for 17% of India’s GDP but represents 5% of the Indian population. Hence Vibrant Gujarat is not an empty slogan.

Vipul and all his artistes including his talented back stage gang - Kamini Pandya as Production Controller, Sagar Agashe (lights), Avijit Sarkar (background music and voice), Tushar Bose (music editing and co-ordination), Sandhya Bose (make-up and dance direction), Tanna family (stage decoration), Chintu Patel, Jwalant Patel, Madhav for stage management - put on a show all Indians especially the Gujarati diaspora in Sydney, can be proud of.

Vipul has taken his play to Melbourne already and will take it to Perth next week. An unprecedented second show in Sydney is scjeduled for 5 June 2010.

The play could not have been the success it was without the help of major sponsors Gujarat NRE and its Chairman and MD Mr Arun Kumar Jagatramka; and Atithi restaurant and all the other advertisers in the brochure. The proceeds of the play went towards the Shri Shiva Mandir at Minto.