EA

Conspicuously unconventional in form and content alike, this single-cast play dwells on a superlatively - and therefore miserably - sensitive individual’s ordeal regarding his coming to terms - albeit in vain - with the codes of modern-day living in a world so pathetically numb and often nonsensical. Although the protagonist - at the very outset - categorically spells out that the audience shouldn’t be expecting for anything glorious and significant to take place, thereby nullifying - or, at least, trying to nullify - the thought of a ‘tragedy’ to be unfolded in the classical sense, the play One Anybody Nobody (Se Ye Emni) does actually open up an even greater modern tragedy. Why an even greater modern tragedy? Because what the protagonist of the play calls for is neither awe nor sympathy nor even a combination of both. Instead, as spectators, we are constantly and consciously made to feel and realize the undying truth herein one of the most famous - or, should we say, infamous? - epigrams of our times: A manever knows what he cannot do until he tries to undo what he did!

And... well, in a word, our protagonist does exactly that through the body of the play. He vehemently tries to undo what he did and has done so far only to get to know what he cannot do, and more importantly, what he cannot even intend or aspire to do. From ‘nobody’ to ‘anybody’, then from ‘anybody’ to ‘one’, and then again from ‘one’ to ‘anybody’ and from ‘anybody’ back to ‘nobody’ - no, note, coming a full cycle doesn’t mean much - it’s a journey, as it were, through the different layers of languishing in the oblivion. It - the play, we mean - is an anti-narrative of the narrative of an individual who does the most unthinkable and unthought-of things in an exquisitely well-thought-out manner. Be it becoming a mobile database of the underground railways, or formulating a new language with the changing nuances of the commonest of common words of our daily use, or claiming himself to be an explorer who has... well... rediscovered North Calcutta (as a matter of fact, this discovery of his can really ashen the glory of our legendary Colombus or Amerigo Vespucci), our protagonist sorely takes up the onus and toes the destiny of metamorphosing from an individual to a collective unit, which encompasses the entire panorama of our soul’s potentials.

One Anybody Nobody, at the end of the day, is a tragedy that has got the potential of challenging the glory of an ironically pathetic non-tragedy. And that’s that.