Stage Play
Stage Play is an event that goes on
through the better part of the
night and carries on much past
daybreak. There are only a
handful of people on campus who
can claim to have sat through the
entire event, although many more are eager to
claim that Stage Play is one of their favourite
events of Oasis, far-removed from any other
event in the fest.
The fourth play, enacted by the dramatics society of Sri
Ram College of Commerce, was the best appreciated by
the audience. With a plot driven by suspense and
interwoven by humour, it followed the events at a
wedding anniversary party. The couple of honour is
absent because the woman had mysteriously gone
missing and the man had been shot in the head.
Audience unanimously agreed that this was the best play
so far, holding and enchanting their attention.
The last play, a production by our very own English
Drama Club, got off to a slightly shaky start because of
delays in stage set-up. The play itself was a philosophical,
utopian, metaphoric piece – centred on the premise that
the society prohibits commoners from growing apples,
though they can buy and eat them. The play conveyed a
theme of frustration and undercurrents of rebellion
through a set of powerfully delivered monologues.
Unfortunately, actors were sometimes not heard clearly
by the audience.
This year, Stage Play got off to a rather
unpleasant start when the first team, SGGSCC,
walked off stage and refused to perform at all,
citing a very unpleasant audience full of hecklers and an
open auditorium door among their reasons for the same.
The next two plays went along without much trouble on
the technical front. Teams managed to make themselves
heard despite the restrictions placed by the fixed mikes
and entertain the sleepy audience sufficiently. There were
a few complaints, though, that these plays were
All in all, Stage Play put up a set of very diverse plays
structurally more similar to street plays than stage plays,
and put out plenty of food for thought to those people
featuring characteristic chants and group songs.
who had enough energy to last the night.
A Ledger from the Controls Booth
It’s been a long and erratic fest, changing in intensity
often. Even before I’ve written the first letter of this
article, the phone rings, and equipment from events need
to be returned.
As I wake someone up, he groggily tells me of a Hotel
California-esque dream that he had where all of us were
slaves and the booth was a castle where we worked. I
shake the foreboding sense of truth I see in the
statement. That said, the Controls booth has always been
my favourite place to be; a similar hubbub of activity
cannot be found elsewhere. The booth receives all sorts
of requests from all sorts of people—from make-up kits
for Fash P by worried mothers to hammers (or as he said,
“anything heavy”) by some worker, to marshalling forces
to clean up vomit from just outside CBD’s office.
Now there is a lady at the booth asking for the phone
she’s pretty sure an auto-rickshaw driver has stolen.
Every few minutes you encounter someone hunting for
pens, pencils, erasers, print outs, printers— the booth
feels like a stationery shop. It’s not. Suddenly, RecnAcc is
out of blankets and the teams are asking us
to be humane. We give them three of ours.
Who needs sleep? It’s for the weak.
Close by, I can clearly see the frazzled faces
of my colleagues handling travels. Someone has broken
an ankle and Raghu Dixit’s band is asking for
alcohol, so the cab isn’t free right now. I try to
make a bad pun on broken ankles and broken
‘spirits’, failing miserably.
This fest has done us all in. I have often found
myself asking what we hope to gain out of
this. I can’t follow that chain of thought for
too long; BoB calls, the generator needs to be
turned off. He also wants me to call an
electrician at three in the morning.
Over time, I have realized that I derive a weird
sense of pleasure and gratification from all of
this. I like being around,
knowing things, being able
to give answers, being the
one providing things. It’s
like that for most of us. It’s
time to go back into the
battle.