Altaf Gomes

The title Altaf Gomes encapsulates the two leading characters of the play. Peter Gomes is a media tycoon. To be more precise, he is the CEO of channel Moon and the chief editor of the leading daily ‘ Khabara Khabar’. He exudes overwhelming power, the power of the media, in engendering, nurturing, and demolishing truths at will. Such truths may be constructed, unfounded and unethical but must be of what the media reckons to be beneficial to its interests. In contradiction to Peter Gomes is Altaf Hossain, the officer-in-charge of Achinpur. He is the voice of ethics and morality; ethics which disregards conventional protocols as much as the politicization of criminality and morality that believes in conscious and immediate action. The play in colliding these two characters tries to explore the warring ideologies that they represent. In the 21st century that we live in, we cannot but live by the stimulations that the media incessantly dishes out for us, without almost simultaneously desiring for some sort of authenticity that would aid us undiscerning the real from the swamping hyper-real. The resolution lies, perhaps, in a collision of these two strands and so a Peter Gomes must learn to acknowledge a Altaf Hossain. The final tableau of the cowered Peter Gomes and the stripped off Altaf Hossain, is thus not a victory of the one over the other, rather it expostulates a healthy co-existence of both whereby simulacrum must also necessarily be interrupted by a counter-hegemony to prevent the present world.