Grooming for Realpolitik

My next encounter with politics came in much later, when I started my practice at Aurangabad. But the background preparation for my entry in politics was done in Solapur, where I spent the two most happening years of my life. It so happened that after my graduation in Bombay in 1975, I went to Solapur to stay with my parents, and started working with Ar. V. T. Kota & Associates.

It was in Solapur that I met Arwind Kulkarni, who stayed across the street, and had a lot of friends all over the place. Through Arwind I got in touch with the study circle of Yukrand (short for Youth Revolutionary Forum) and an amature theatre group called Natya-Pushpanjali (drama as an offering of flowers to God). And then there were other groups too, consisting of his friends from the school & so on. My friendship with Arwind thus facilitated my entry into Solapur beyond the small group of architectural & building construction industry.

The study circles were a boring affair to start with, but taught me a lot about the Marxist theories. There I had my first brush with 'Das Capital' and the theory of dialectical materialism. Eventually I found out that the theories were not important, what was important was that they dealt with a hope that someday the poverty, the inequitable distribution of wealth & resources and all the ills that plagued our world, all this would some day be conquered by the revolution. In fact the theories actually suggested a way to deal with the situation.

There is a saying that if you live in third world, you get attracted to communism when you are young & have a heart, but if you continue to believe those theories at thirty it proves that you do not have a head. I have now passed from both these stages, and as I no longer believe in communism, I can claim to have a head.

But as a young intellectual, the Marxist theories about the world captured my imagination. The Utopian dreams of Marxism were enough to spur us to change the world. I remember the animated discussion on how China & Russia got the common man liberated from the clutches of the wicked rulers (both the feudal lords & the capitalists) and how a similar revolution is not only possible but inevitable in India. It all seems so ridiculous now, but then, in those study circle groups it was indeed a matter of life & death. I have seen people fighting over meaning of a phrase or the right way to interpret Marx in the Indian context & so on. But it was all politics of the naive, without a brush with reality.

That background served us well when we jointly wrote a drama called 'El Komero' based on a revolutionary group in a Latin American country. The story was based on a real one I had read, which dealt with kidnapping of Patty Hearst . When the kidnappers were caught finally by the police, they were surprised to see Patty helping the gang to fight with the police. It turned out that she had fallen in love with one of the members of the gang. We found the story dramatic enough but had no sympathy for the kidnappers. Hence after much thought, we decided to convert them into freedom-fighters & the father as a capitalist who helps the tyrannical dictator of 'El Komero', a fictitious south American nation. This, we thought, would generate sympathy for the kidnappers and make them heroes in the eyes of both the heroine and the general public.

I used a lot of communist theory I had heard in the study circle to spice up the story, but as it happened, it was Arwind (who was a known communist) who got the credit for that part of the drama. But we enjoyed writing the drama, putting all that we had learned in the study circle, and our two years of working in Natya-pushpanjali. We had sought to create a dazzling drama (almost on the lines of 'Sholay'), and saw ourselves as the new team of 'Salim-Javed'.

When we read the script to our group for the first time, there were cheers all round, and we started day-dreaming about the possible state level award for script-writing. We even succeeded in getting together three amature theatre groups to stage the play-creating a history of sorts in the amature theatrical circles in Solapur. But that is another story.