Second Log: 5 November 2022

The Mobile Girls Koottam play is now officially a production implemented by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.

Just the enough fuel to bring this together.

The Mobile Girls Koottam is a six-year long journey. It must be a much longer journey for Madhumita, of how she came into labour activism and growing it all the way to how she approaches academics and research, and carved out this little space for me to cultivate an artistic practice out of it.

Beginning from producing the podcast to this theatre production. When the news of the factory closure hit us, along with the job security of our friends and thousand other workers, it was also an emotional ending to our podcast.

From my Director’s Note, you would see how we got to this part of our journey – deciding to cast it with theatre actors, growing it into a show that will have a traveling performance space/tea shop on a van. Now, how do we actually pull this off? There is a certain physical distance between the people part of this – mobile phones and zoom calls bring us together. Even after the programme beginning, the logistics of actually pulling it off stayed a question.

At this point, Madhu had messaged us that she is coming down to Chennai on 10-11 December weekend. I have Sundays off from office work. Sometimes, stubbornness is the only way to get work done.

I set a show date – 11 December 2022.

The only way energies come together in theatre is the commitment

whatever happens, the show must go on

I managed to find three theatre actors – Aparnaa, Nimmy and Atchaya – who were willing to commit for the first show. Playing around with call-sheets, I took a call that I would do this play with a rolling cast – as in whoever is available will take it forward. This way I was just keeping it focused on who would perform for the show on 11 December.

This is when something beautiful and organic happened. Selvi, who was once my child’s caretaker, then my ailing father’s caretaker and later became my driver, who is also an adopted sister, was watching me put this together and got excited during our conversations. She approached me and asked me if she could perform in this play. This excited me a lot, because one Selvi and her life is the closest to what the Mobile Girls were back in the day when the factory closed down. She is around 25, and though the circumstances are different, there is a lot of them already in her.

The idea is to work backwards instead of forwards. This is half the fun of directing something. My head is always around the show date – on how each of these small bits will come together and create the larger picture – visually, emotionally, sensorially, artistically, and socially. A theatrical show is a curation of a live experience; there is always a degree of immersion you are trying to curate.