Upcoming Events

Monsoon Bazaar Sunday. Discover a wide range of Healthy organic products. Meet Like minded people.
Enjoy an afternoon with an entire family. Stock up your kitchen. Find item for home use.

Natya Swara will be presenting Kuchipudi artiste Sindhuja, a student of Yashoda Thakur, on the 1st of july in the evening for a 1 hour long recital

The Startup Leadership Program (SLP) is a highly selective, world-class training program for outstanding founders, leaders and innovators who are or want to be startup CEOs, and be connected to a global network. SLP Fellows have founded over 300 breakthrough startups including Duron Energy, Gharpay, ixigo, Innoz, Momelan, Runkeeper, SideTour, Shareaholic, Solar Junction, Ubersense, Savored, Voicetap, and have won many awards.

During the 1 hour session that we are organizing we are looking to introduce potential fellows to SLP and also brief them on the admissions process.

Provider Meet is an open door meeting for the providers(freelance web and graphic designers)

There is something inherently touching about 77 year old, internationally reputed pantomime artiste, Irshad Panjatan performing his piece “Walk of life” before an eager audience in Pune. One look at this frail, stooping “young” man (who enthusiastically gets up from his seat to demonstrate to us a few steps of Kathakali - the dance form that has immensely helped the physical craft of his chosen art) and you know that he earns the right to portray the long journey that human beings make during their lifetime. What also makes his performance special is the fact that he is returning to the stage after a 15 years long sabbatical. Refusing to call it a ‘comeback’, he says he came for the sake of his dear friend Amol Palekar, organiser of the three-day festival “Theatre Beyond Words”, for which he has flown down from his home in Germany.
The emotional build-up to the event is, thus, very palpable. It is no wonder then that the septuagenarian, who was “nervous and afraid” hours before the show, receives a standing ovation for his depiction of a man’s life, from the innocence of childhood to the adventurous spirit of youth to the loneliness of old age.
When the voluminous shaft of the spotlight first falls on his painted face and his body clothed in a white one-piece, he’s a newborn reacting to the blinding brightness of the outside world, the soundless cry of being cut off from the warm security of the womb escaping his coiled up body. The child has been born, the actor has come to life. The spotlight is the stark space in which he builds his invisible world. Yet, for the next hour or so, you are completely drawn in to the experience of the child’s first encounter with death after he accidentally kills a butterfly, the thrill of freedom when he first rides a bike as a teenager, his tremulous excitement when he meets his lover as a young man and finally, the heartbreaking acceptance of old age when he waves his children goodbye.
While the exaggerated gestures or physical movements make for easy and hearty laughs, it’s the minutiae of existence that Panjatan so effortlessly captures that move you, take you through a range of emotions. “ Fortunately or unfortunately, I haven’t been through any formal training in pantomime. I learnt the physical aspects of this art from books and masters whom I met briefly. The difficult part is to imbue soul in to your performance. For that, you have to have the ability to imagine how a child would react, his perplexity, when he sees death in the form of a butterfly which refuses to fly when he blows air on to it,” Panjatan says.
It is the same soul with which he glibly slips into the role of a woman who’s dressing up to meet her man. The nuances of expressions which flit across his face - as he becomes the woman who goes about putting hairclips in her bun, making pleats of the saree she’s about to drape, dabbing excess lipstick on a paper and admiring herself in the mirror - are worth the resounding applause that he elicits from the auditorium.
But there’s more than just laughter and applauds that Panjatan evokes. He appeals to the universal core of human nature, which smiles when it sees a happy child and saddens when it sees the decline of old age. “Tragedy is the seed of comedy. If you see Chaplin, all his stories are basically sad. The way they are presented causes laughter, but eventually they all make you think,” he explains, unintentionally summing up the effect that his own performance has had on all of us.

MIYA - BIWI (COMEDY HINDI PLAY)

Screening of Two Docus:

THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE AIR
26 min. 2011
Director : Iram Ghufran

CALL CUTTA
Director: Anjan Dutt, 48 min., 2006

Awareness workshop about Learning difficulties in children

auditions for our independent feature film trip on 14th n 15th july.

Malegaon, a small town tucked away near the heart of India geographically, is fraught with communal tension and under severe economic depression. To escape the harsh reality of their world, its people seek refuge in the fantastical world of cinema. This passion for cinema has spurred a group of cinema enthusiasts to make their own films-quirky, low budget, socially aware and notoriously funny spoofs of Bollywood films. Their ambition has grown and now they are ready to take on Hollywood and Superman. We follow them on this journey. At times funny, tragic, contemplative. Always warm and engaging. And as the film begins to take shape, through schemes and approaches that are sublimely ingenious, simply bizarre and purely hysterical, we also slowly discover Malegaon itself. A microcosm that embodies and reflects the complexities of modern small town India. Where the modern and the traditional rub shoulders, where extreme poverty and extreme wealth are neighbours, bewildering in its diversity, trapped in self-made destinies, with a spirit that can never be vanquished. The film is a tribute to that spirit, the spirit that enables The Supermen of Malegaon to make Malegaon's Superman.

IGNITING MINDS Guest Lecture by Ms. Bhanumathi Kalluri on ‘Land Acquisition Policy – From a Tribal’s Perspective’

What do three fretful men do in a Park?

We know what you’re thinking. “Fretful men don’t go to a Park these days. You can only find them in the corners in rundown or funky little pubs, where they sit and dunk beers or neat whiskey shots to feel better. At least till the next morning” Well, almost all men do that. But some men still go to a Park.

Yes they do.

They prefer an isolated Park bench in the shade of a tree. Some sit and read a book, some take a power nap and some fix their eyes on something exotic to find peace of mind.

If you don’t think they exist, you should come to Lamakaan on the 22nd of July. They’ll be there.
Will they find the peace of mind they’re looking for? We believe that’s something even they don’t know yet.



Written by Manav Kaul
Directed by Feroze