Arun Kukreja is that kind of a person. Whenever and wherever he decides to bend his head, in homage, in devotion, in obeisance, God will have to appear! He really has no choice. How does this phenomenon happen? From a fountainhead of those same neurons and particles of energy within Arun which drive the galaxies, the wind, the mountain stream on its relentless journey to the ocean and the moonbeam on its effort to light up the cosmos.
Appropriately, then, both his concerns and his subjects are galactic, epic, vast in their scale and grandeur. They are rarely less than the Bhagwad Gita and the Ramayana . And his favourite characters? Ravana and Arjuna. Kunti and Gandhari. Bhishma and Eklavya. Always larger than life, big, bigger, biggest.
Dashaanan, fevered, imaginative, rich, epochal soliloquy that pours out of the ten heads of Mahapurush Ravana was originally written by Kukreja in Hindi. Surprisingly, even the English translation does rare justice to the concept of the anti hero-the Mahanaayak who is in every way equal to the gods but somehow is cheated by destiny from getting that status.
In a prashnavali in the Rig Veda, among many other questions is this: Ko Vairi? Who is the enemy? The answer is: laziness. That is one sin Arun kukreja is not guilty of. His phenomenal energy informs every crevice of his work and makes it both human and extraterrestrial, both searching and somehow arrived. It redeems whatever he does.
Shanta Serbjeet Singh
About the book:
Fevered, rich, imaginative soliloquy which pours out of the magnificent Ravana, Dashaanan is an interesting treatment of the concept of an antihero who is in every way equal to the gods but is somehow cheated of that status by destiny. Dashaanan has been compared to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Milton's Paradise Lost.
About the Author:
Founder of the Ruchika theatre group, Arun Kukreja has directed, designed and dramatized around sixty novels well-acclaimed premiere theatre productions of India based on the works of masters such as Camus, Beckett, Girish Karnad and Sophocles. He has also won entry into the Limca Book of Records for making the first one-actor silent film Sangeet Yachana and the first one-actress talkie Astha Nayika. The Bhagavad Gita and Dashaanan have both won entries in the Limca Book of Records as the first monologues on epics.
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