‘Blame it on Yash Raj’ casts a spell on city residents

Gurvinder Singh

Tribune News Service

Ludhiana, September 11

Hours before enacting the English play “Blame it on Yash Raj”, veteran actors including Ananth Mahadevan and Jayati Bhatia, along with Punit Tejawani, Anchal Sabharwal, Palash Dutta, Neel Gagdani, Gaurav Sharma, director Bharat Dabholkar and producer Ashwin Gidwani, talked about their experience in the city.

Ludhiana Sanskritik Samagam had organised the play. Jayati said Indian weddings have become bigger over the years and somewhere down the line, the actual wedding and tradition of ‘pooja’, ‘lavan-phere’ has become a very small part of the wedding.

“Weddings, these days are about how lavish, innovative and bigger they can get and the reflection of this changing attitude is seen in this play as well,” she said.

“This play is about celebrations and the joys of wedding,” she said.

“A Punjabi girl enacted by Anchal Sabharwal and a Muslim boy enacted by Punit Tejwani are to get married. The play sends an indirect message of how people should not be judgemental about other communities in this era. The Punjabi family in the play feels that the Muslim family would be orthodox, but they turn out to be very open and vivacious,” she said.

Another message is that weddings don’t have to be a sad affair for a girl’s family, as it concludes on a happy note with dance and music, instead amid tears of ‘vidai’.

Producer Ashwin Gidwani and director Bharat Dhabolkar said the play was in its third year and was being staged in Punjab for the first time. Gidwani said the play has been staged at several places in the country and abroad, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, Australia among other places. He said it would be staged at the prestigious Montecasino in Johannesburg in South Africa, where 10 back-to-back shows would be performed.

Director Bharat Dabholkar said lavish weddings have received a fillip from Suraj Barjatya and Yash Raj Chopra films, adding that Yash Raj’s films have been a kind of representative of such weddings, which is the reason why the play was titled after Yash Raj, he said.

Punjabi weddings are getting popular in different cultures. He said the play was a reflection of what happens during wedding preparation and this was the reason why everyone in the audience was able to relate to the characters in the play.

“It is a complete musical play using LED lights. The backdrop changes 35 times during the play for different sets,” he said.

Mahadevan said he has been into theatre for the past 30 years and this was his biggest production, adding that he enjoyed doing this play.

Anchal Sabharwal from Chandigarh said this was her first play and she was fortunate to get an opportunity to work with AGP World productions and with such eminent actors as a debutante.

She said they enjoyed performing the play on stage as well as backstage.

The actors said Ludhianvis in particular would be able to relate to the play as the culture of big fat weddings was very popular in Ludhiana.