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Theatre activists from Karnataka would meet every year on World Theatre Day to advocate a better deal for regional theatre. Every year the Ministry of Culture would make the right noises and protests would be put off for another year. This year in January a frail-looking man with tremendous guts decided to take the bull by the horns. Theatre activist S Prasanna started an indefinite hunger strike under the banner of his organisation Abhivyakti Abhiyan. He demanded that each state should have its own National School of Drama to accord "national status" to theatre in all regional languages, own national repertory and own theatre-in-education programme to make the learning process in children more pleasurable. Surprisingly ‘satyagraha’ succeeded where 10 years of protests had not. The indefinite hunger strike got immense response from Kannada language proponents, forcing ministers and even the Chief Minister to step in to plead with Prasanna to break his fast. The fast was broken on the fifth day after an assurance from Union Cultural Affairs Minister Ambika Soni who said five National Schools of Drama (NSDs) would be established in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal and the North-East in the 11th Five Year Plan. At the state level, Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy allocated land for the construction of a National School of Drama, earmarked a provisional building for the same and also promised that all posts of drama teachers would be filled. How did a frail-looking man with only moral force by his side succeed in making both the Central and state governments listen to his demands and even force them to make commitments? Prasanna is candid enough to admit he did not expect such a huge popular support for his cause. However, he said, this happened because his organisation successfully linked theatre with the mother tongue, jolting people out of the complacence and forcing them to take a stand on the issue. Claiming that television had served as the death-knell of regional theatre in India, he said all over the world when television was introduced in a big way steps were taken to protect the cultural ecology. In India thousands of crores of rupees were spent to spread the reach of television to every village in the country. Later the same vigour was seen in spreading the reach of cable television and Internet services. However, Prasanna said, nothing was done to protect the cultural environment. He feels introducing theatre-in-education would help disperse theatre graduates into small towns and would also revolutionise primary education, especially when it came to teaching in the mother tongue. "Theatre has to ‘do a radio’ by becoming smaller and get absorbed as part of the community by going into schools," he says, adding that such a programme has already been implemented in a big way in European countries. Prasanna says there is also a need to form a high-powered committee to formulate a national policy on theatre-in-education. He said this national policy could be implemented through various state governments.
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