I tried to a do a playwriting workshop with a bunch of young people. It was a nothing workshop. After half a dozen days (and plays!), I was confronted with questions. Questions to which I've no answers. Perhaps some of you can help me ...

- Today, what is the meaning of theatre? A thing where many worlds can play? Or a kind of theatrical McDonaldisation where everyone has the same taste?

- How does one tackle issues and real politiks? How does one address issues in a play without over-simplifying it with sentimentalism and melodrama? Like the Kashinamas and Nine Hills One Valley which all of us have suffered.

- Whose identity is it anyway? Look at the history of theatre-makers from Africa, Caribbean, South Asia, interiors of Telengana. Most voices are side-lined as figures which speak only to minority ethnic interests. Therefore talent and aesthetics always plays second fiddle to the hegemony of the art centres.

- How does a performance piece avoid being pigeon-holed? When a young group stages Beckett or Pinter, does it go beyond narrow stereotypes which prevent the development of an open theatrical community? Or would it be seen as derivative; and a borrowing from a colonial past?

- Can a new generation of theatre-makers (for example, a Mohit Takalkar) re-invent say "Europeaness" and erode insurmountable boundaries of culture, race and class? Or will we have to be - in a sense - dependent on a Peter Brooks who stages and trivialises the Mahabharata as part of cultural window shopping ... and then decides that he and his ilk have the right to tell the story instead of letting us tell the tale.

- What happens when little known voices like a Roysten Abel or Maya Rao do their thing in Europe? Is it fake, is it real? Or is their work evidence that perception of what constitutes contemporary voice (in itself such a de rigueur term) has begun to change?

- Satish Alekar achieves some of this when he draws upon myths and regions of several different cultures in his work, discovering links and parallels between them. Be it: Mahanirvan or Begum Barve. Unfortunately, most of us don't know about Alekar because of a fashionable media which ensures invisibility of the best talents in the theatre ...

- This begs the question: how does one remain familiar with contemporary theatre's most exciting and distinctive voices. How do I popularise a play which was submitted to me to read for the Writer's Bloc short list. In it, two women paint the invisible fourth wall and talk about their foibles. Who is the playwright, and what is the name of her play? Likewise a very inebriated playwright comes home and reads an unpublished / unperformed play which he penned in the mid-seventies. Its lovely. But the embittered playwright is adamant that he doesn't want his play to be peformed, ever.

- What about the words and worlds which exist beyond narrowly defined borders? Pieter De Buysser's Dutch plays, Toshiki's Japanese plays, Carlos Pez Gonzalez's French plays? The list is endless ...

- Then there is the larger unaddressed issue of theatre being increasingly marginalised (perhaps made redundant?) in a world which has a wider-angle lense. How does one position new works in the theatre in such a world?

- So? To be or not to be? Transnationalism v/s localism v/s focus on oppressive political regimes v/s emphasizing the experience of the exile v/s the need to give voices to previously silenced histories?

- What then is the future ...

Tomorrow
The disciple
Shall return home
After he has memorised
Ten thousand new tracts

Tomorrow
The Guru
Shall bless him
And instruct the student to unlearn
Everything
Once and for all

**The writer is a theatre person and Editor of the Prithvi Theatre Newsletter (PT Notes). His recent plays include the critically acclaimed JAZZ and SHAKESPEARE AND SHE. This article first appeared in Hindustan Times on 3rd June 2008. It has been reproduced here with the writer's permission.