“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” - Joseph Goebbels

The amount and speed at which information is available today is more than what our ordinary brains can handle. Such is the proliferation of information and misinformation from every perspective imaginable that it’s almost impossible to find out what the truth is. Goebbels would have had a field day in today’s world. He knew the power of information. How it could be used to play with people’s minds, alter lifestyles that they’ve been following for decades, make them question morals and institutions that have been sacred for centuries, and make it easy for them to turn on each other.

Des by Abhishek Majumdar is a satirical take on today’s “post truth” India. Although it’s set on the eve of Independence, it deals with questions that are plaguing us as a nation today. What is freedom? What is a nation? Who does it belong to? How do you protect it? And what do you do when you have to choose between the imagined community that is the nation and the very real love you feel towards people in your immediate vicinity?

Rasika Agashe’s direction gives the play a kaleidoscopic angle that changes colors with every new piece of “information” that is added. She uses the characters of Des as a microcosm for the nation, and the role of information in changing the tenets of nationalism from 1947 to this date.

Writer : Abhishek Majumdar

Director : Rasika Aagashe

Cast : Puneet Mishra, Sonalee Bharadwaj, Trinetra Tiwari, Mahendra Walunj

Venue : Le Chakallas, Andheri West.

Date : 10/09/2022

Time : 6pm & 9pm