I express my heartfelt gratitude to Rahul Gandhi — had he not sent his wishes to Narendra Modi on 27th March, perhaps I would never have known that that date is celebrated as the World Theatre Day. In that context, I would add that in spite of the enormous effort and time spent, no artist has ever been able to match the acting skills of any politician. Anyway, instead of discussing politics, I would rather write a few words to commemorate this day and to pay belated tribute to all the people who are involved in performing arts.

Harmony is the essence of life. In no other field of human activity is it more apparent than in dramatics. Here, the success of any act depends completely and equally on all the participants. If one or more actors fail to play their roles satisfactorily, the whole play is a disaster. In addition, there are players who remain in the background and completely hidden from the viewers and audience. In this light, it is a great challenge to the director to maintain this harmony. For example, the director may decide that a particular actress is suitable for a particular character, and selects her. But she is a very experienced and polished actress. Other actors may find it difficult to match steps with her. In such cases, the performance of the actress is too conspicuous to ignore and stands out against rest of the others. One could also have a sense that the actress has toned down her talent, and is not giving her full potential so that the remaining actors could stand equal to her. I don’t know whether this is just my perception or does it really happen in the theatre world. Either way — whether she compromises her talent and potential or not — this lack of harmony does lower the quality of the group performance. If the director does not want to ruin his work just because of this lack of balance, he has to select actors who would be able to stand at exactly same level of talent, potential and ability. Selecting such actors is not easy and not always possible — mostly because of financial constraints and non-availability of actors. Mostly the directors make a compromise. Instead of assembling a crew only of senior actors, they choose only one or two such experienced actors, who would be playing the lead roles, or rather the important scenes. Other actors could be given comparatively less important scenes — less important in the sense that it would not affect the overall quality of the performance. Every character is important of course. But there are certain scenes, certain acts which are very dear to the director and the writer. They want those scenes to be portrayed in the best possible manner and certainly do not want to compromise on them in any way.