RIPPLES, written by Gerish Khemani and Harsh Desai, is a play about education contradicting education. An unusual teacher spends time in a village classroom, leading five children to internalise their learning and to contemplate themselves. Its strongest merit is that it lays out this endeavour in a manner that is intelligent and creative even though it sometimes lapses into ornate prose. Director Gerish Khemani and his team are so well-intentioned and sincere that some of the play's wordy indulgence can be overlooked. The play, after all, does make a fine point about language being the repository of knowledge. Words can be inspiring.
It is a sad fact that our education system is almost, always about marks and grades. The fortunate few among us may recall a more sensitive teacher or mentor. The unfortunate among us may even be scathed for life while the lot of us just otherwise wades through this most respectable of early charades. This is precisely what the play critiques, but in a classroom in rural India, where our society's structuring of caste and class dominates. The student Manya (Nikhil Modak) represents this entrenched, vicious aspect. But his four friends apart from teasing him about his hygiene and his father are close-knit.
Each of these students has a spark. Paritosh (Varun Vazir) is the diligent student with an interest in Science. Vinit (Chirag Lobo) is the mischievous brat and constantly teases Paritosh about a fellow-student Prajakta (Heena Sharma). Bhadra (Barkha Fatnani) has a talent for writing and stories. The group regularly meets at the village well for innocent camaraderie; its depth and waters providing fertile imagination. It is their performance and their chemistry modulated by teacher Abhijit's (Arjun Radhakrishnan) interventions that make the production worthwhile. Weighty texts like The Godfather are introduced with the hope that they may leave deeper impressions.
The teacher's ''iconoclastic'' approach is met with reluctance at first by the headmaster (Prasad Dagare) who later feels differently. As the students clip their writings in the classroom and dates are changed to mark the passing days, the teacher with his own past, becomes eventually a figment of Bhadra's story. The individual stories of the teacher, the students as well as the headmaster's are touched on in passing without any deliberate emphasis. The focus remains on an education that can be more redeeming than reductive.
Crates are used imaginatively in the set design - as desks and benches, as well as for the more symbolic moments in the play. The background music acts as appropriate filler between scenes.
There are structural weaknesses though - both in terms of the cultural setting of the play, as well as in the overall cohesiveness of this partly devised production. The alternate use of Marathi and English only helps to some extent in delivering cultural resonance. The village well, the big eerie tree with its legends of ghosts are other veneers of the imagined rural life. Beyond a point, the formulated introductions of text and poetry, and exercises with moral imperatives and life-lessons, become the production's mainstay with nowhere further to go.
Yet the play's quest is worthy. Its innate, contrarian spirit, imbibed with certain freshness, makes it a constructive and well-spent theatre outing.
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