FESTIVALPALESTINE IN FOCUS:Maraa along with drama

therapist Mahnoor Yar Khan will organise Present Continuous: with Palestine, a week-long event of film screenings, photo exhibition and poetry performances. Maraa, Jul 3, 7pm

ARTROYAL SHOW: NGMA in collaboration with The Raja

Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation will be holding ‘Raja Ravi Varma: Royal Lithography and Legacy’, a historic show of 131 lithographs of the royal artist. NGMA, Palace Road, Jul 8, 7.30pm

CARTOONS POLITICALLY CORRECT:

The Indian Institute of Cartoonists will hold an exhibition of selected works of Sir David Low, considered to be one of the greatest political cartoonists of all time. IIC,Midford House, Jul 9, 11am

THEATRE CLASSIC REPERTOIRE: The theatre adaptation of

Samskara, the UR Anantamurthy classic will be staged by Rangayana as part of the five-day Rangavihara Natakotsava being organised by NGO, Bhagavatharu. Ravindra Kalakshetra, Jul 4, 7pm

THEATREDEAR FRIDA: Theatre group

Mi Amor celebrates artist Frida Kahlo's birthday by staging the play, My Diego, My Art, a no-holds-barred take on Kahlo’s love for artist Diego Rivera and her complete honesty in art. The Hummingteee, Jul 6, 8.30pm

Sharath Komarrajuwrites fiction and non-

fiction. His best known work is the Hastinapur series

SHELF ESTEEM

THE TIMES OF INDIA, BENGALURUCult FOLLOWING SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2016 8

What are you reading right now?The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries.My wife caught me with it the other day and said worriedly, ‘That better be for research.’ It is. I’m due to be writing a mystery later this year, so I figured these stories will serve up some inspiration. And fun too. Lots of fun.

Name one book you picked up at the airport that blew your mind?I fly less than twice a year – and that too domestically – so the opportunity of picking up a book at an airport bookstore hardly ever presents itself. I did discover NASEERUDDIN SHAH’S And Then One Day while browsing at an airport, and I bought it immediately after I got home. The book didn’t blow my mind, but it did surpass expectations.

Which book, author or series do you reach out for when you want a comfort read?I’d read an AGATHA CHRISTIEnovel (preferably one with Miss Marple in it). Other comfort reads are the Blandings Castle series by WODEHOUSE, and anything by ISAAC ASIMOV. I’ve been known to reach for a STEPHEN KINGnovel on lazy afternoons too. And there’s always a Tinkle Digest on hand when nothing else works.

Who are your favourite contemporary writers, and your favourite writers of all time?Favourite writers of all time are AGATHA CHRISTIE, PG WODEHOUSE, ISAAC ASIMOVand STEPHEN KING. Among contemporary writers, I’ve been reading and watching a lot of ALAIN DE BOTTON (non fiction) and LAWRENCE BLOCK (fiction) lately.

Name one book that is a favourite – but most people would be surprised to know you’d read it... There is a collection of short romance novellas called Bad Boys in Black Tie – written by LORI FOSTER, ERIN MCCARTHY and MORGAN LEIGH – that I remember reading when I was 17 and being quite smitten. I still not only remember the stories but also certain passages. Men aren’t meant to admit to reading and liking romance, but there you go.

Which book do you remember most vividly from your childhood?Perhaps no other book has had as much an influence on me as a child as The Trojan War. We had an abridged version for our English supplementary reading in class 6, and I must have read it at least 15 times during the school year. That love for mythology persists to this day.

Name one book that is on your most must-read lists but you haven’t cracked a page?Oh, there are so many. Moby Dickis one. I once picked up Finnegan’s Wake and couldn’t make sense of it. (My loss entirely.) But the book I keep trying to crack is A Tale of Two Cities. The famous opening paragraph draws me in, but boy does it slow down after that. I live in hope, though. One day...

If the PM promises to read the book,

might I recommend Wodehouse’s Bachelors Anonymous? It will give him a few laughs

Mahalakshmi.P & Sandhya Soman | TNN

It was a Wednesday night and dentist Rahul Kumar was fast asleep when he was woken up by a loud sound. It felt like the sky was about to open up on that night in

2008 as peals of booming thunder claps resonated through White-field, one after the other. “I still remember the time. The first was at 12.30, then at 12.45 and again at 12.55am,” recalls Dr Kumar.

However, there were no accom-panying showers. Unlike the other denizens of Whitefield and nearby areas, 28-year-old Kumar didn’t think it was an explosion. Air Force denied night-time sor-ties while BBMP and others said there was no underground drill-ing. Once earthquakes were also ruled out, the good doctor concluded that it could only have been a sonic boom caused by an object travelling faster than sound. In this case, an unidenti-fied flying object (UFO) must have entered Bengaluru’s atmosphere to cause the midnight boom and bang.

In the world of Dr Kumar and other amateur Ufolo-gists, a smal l breed in Bengalu-ru, any unusual sound or sight is

worthy of investigation for they believe that there is life out there. And Karnataka, they say, is rife with ET (extra-terrestrial) activ-ity, which is often mistaken as the handiwork of high-tech defence departments or the many divine manifestations of our country.

Prem Koshy, a veteran Ufolo-gist from the city, points to the ‘sighting’ at a vi l lage in Periyapatna near Mysuru that had TV channels in a tizzy. A blinding flash of cigar-shaped light is supposed to have lit up Solakote village in 2015, leading to fainting women and terrified men. Aliens near Mangaluru and flying saucers in Hassan too have been reported, in the recent past.

Koshy, who got into Ufology after listening to accounts of the famous crashed alien spacecraft at the highly secretive US airbase Area 51 while in that country, says not everything comes from outer space. “There have been instanc-es like a frisbee coming over trees being mistaken for a flying saucer in photographs,” says Koshy. Sola-kote, he says, could be the genuine article. For one, a report prepared

according to an American UFO group guidelines

checks all the boxes. Also, a similar col-

umn of light was spotted in Mexico soon after, com-plete with video. “To me there is something to be further investigat-

ed,” he says.Though not many

Indian scientists pursue stud-

ies in this area, a few are into un-locking the

m y s t e r y. “Our universe

has billions of galaxies and each galaxy has billions of stars. Even tiny-scale searches are revealing earth-size planets by the thou-sands. It is a near impossibility that there is no other intelligent species in our universe,” says Pushkar Vaidya, chief scientist and founder of Indian Astrobiol-ogy Research Centre (IARC). IARC, a Mumbai-based research organisation, is one of the few institutions that study alien life.

Vaidya, who was in the city

recently to give a talk about alien life, says he got into Ufology after being inspired by sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke. His current area of research is panspermia which postulates that life is distributed throughout the universe by mete-oroids, asteroids and comets. “It is obvious that there is something out there, it is just that one cannot explain it through traditional means. Science above all, is an

adventure into the unknown,” says Vaidya.

If there is something that is taking the sheen off these ‘sight-ings’, it is irresponsible report-ing, insists Vaidya. “If someone cannot identify an airplane flying overhead, then he or she must use her head first before reporting it as UFO. It is this frivolous report-ing that has made a mockery of the whole thing,” he says.

Apart from a majority of sci-entific community being in “com-

plete denial” about the phenom-enon, there are other issues in India, says Koshy. “Here, any-thing that seems paranormal is attributed to gods or evil spirits. In Solakote, the villagers with no idea about aliens thought the light and vibration was gods’ way of punishing them,” he says.

HR professional Avinash K Nirala is somebody who prefers to read into Indian myths and

connect them to alien myths. “I haven’t witnessed anything but ancient alien theory about the pyramid of Giza and other struc-tures connects a lot to Indian mythology,” says Nirala, who tried to create a group of fellow enthusiasts. Today, on World UFO day, Dr Kumar and a group will visit a Chikkaballapur temple to unearth its ‘loka’ or alien connec-tions, the old Whitefield spot and a trekker’s route where people have seen the ‘ship’.

Meanwhile, online forums and groups are buzzing about specula-tions over US presidential candi-date Hillary Clinton’s remarks about releasing Area 51 docu-ments about UFOs. She even cor-rected the term in an interview to ‘unexplained aerial phenome-non’. “How long can this hooky business go on?” asks Koshy. Looks like there are enough and more stories out there.

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

If books can be discussed, why can’t theatre? And so it is that Speaking of Theatre in its second edition will put the focus on critical facets

of theatre. There will be panel discussions,workshops, talks and special, devised performances as part of this two-day theatre con-fluence. Of course, noted names like Abhishek Majumdar, Anita Santhanam, KV Ramani, Shara-nya Ramprakash and Vivek Madan among others add heft to the event, which according to co-organiser Vikram Sridhar “is a celebration of theatre and the koothadi (performer) in us.”

Being held at performance space Atta Galatta, Sridhar, whose theatre group Tahatto is event partner, says that the idea to hold an event like this came out of the thought that “while there are enough theatre performances happening in the city, there re-ally are no platforms where peo-ple could talk about theatre and the confluence hopes to fill that void.” Sridhar has spent the last 3-4 months putting the event together.

In curating the event, he says that attention has been paid to tackle diverse topics that are high-ly relevant ‘not just to artistes but also to audiences because one can’t exist without the other’.

The panel discussion on Satur-day being moderated by Nimi

Ravindran, for instance, delves in to the question of ‘what art owes its audience’. On Sunday, noted playwright Abhishek Majumdar talks about ‘the process of play-writing and the roles playwrights have played in theatre systems across classical and devised forms’.

In addition to the workshops and talks which are free, Sridhar is also excited about the specially curated performances that are a part of the schedule.

“We have curated performanc-

es that are being done for the first time here, and this might also be the only time they will be per-formed. Called From Scratch, we have Bharatanatyam dancer Ku-mudha Bharat Ram collaborating with dastango Kafeel Jafri – it’s a rare experiment and we gave the artistes a whole month to work on it,” says Sridhar.

The other performances in-clude Lady Anandi by Anuja Gho-salkar, and Anthology: a compila-tion of five award-winning plays

by Stray Factory from Chennai. “On Sunday, we also have ten ac-tors from the city who will come together to dramatise 10 news ar-ticles into performance pieces," says Sridhar. He hopes that the confluence will give audiences an immersive experience, one where they not only get to watch perfor-mances but also take part in it through workshops. “I hope Speaking of Theatre evolves into a go-to event for everything related to theatre,” he signs off.

Manuja.Veerappa@timesgroup.com

What do you do when you are making a film on love in a city like Bengaluru?

First, you start the story in Kan-nada and then, switch to Tamil. For, this place has become the city of migrants and couples who have made it their home latch onto one another for secu-rity and companionship.

Actor Sulile Kumar’s maid-en attempt at film-making, a short film about a working cou-ple from Bengaluru, traverses languages and themes to tell a pithy tale about eternal love. ‘Broken Tide’ joins the league of experimental indie movies that is hitting Kannada indus-try. It premiered last weekend to positive reviews.

The 28-minute-short has just two characters played by Kumar and Samyukta Hornad. Shot in Madikeri, the film spends around 10 minutes on the conver-sations between the couple, before turning into an emotional roller-coaster ride in a car.

“I wrote the script in Kan-nada but switched to Tamil later. When I started thinking about migrant couples in the city, I realized that most of them are here without family support

and seek comfort and compan-ionship in each other,” says Kumar, who made his acting debut with the state award-winning ‘Marikondavaru’.

Once the new perspective was achieved, the theme also flour-ished. In the day and age of in-stant love and social media break ups, Kumar’s movie takes people through the journey of love with a traditionalist approach. Love here is eternal though the nature of it changes over time.

“On most occasions, we don’t really look at the various facets of love. It is never just black and white. In this film I wanted to look beyond the mun-dane because every love story has a honeymoon period,” says Kumar about the film which also has a smattering of English and Kannada.

Once the honeymoon period is over, things change. “For everyone the definition of love is similar but the experiences are different,” says Kumar.

The film, which was shot in four days, has an unusual title. “Like a tide, true love remains unbroken. It is just fresh layers of emotions that camouflage it. Deep down, love remains unaltered. This is my belief which I have conveyed through the movie,” says Kumar, who is set to take Broken Tide to various film festivals.

Here, the spotlight is on theatre

A multi-cultural short film on love

‘Men aren’t meant to admit

to reading romance’

SCOURING THESKY FOR SAUCERS

They are the local Mulders who believe that the truth is out there. As the world celebrates UFO daytoday, city ufologists recount their encounters with alien stories and incredible sightings in Karnataka

OBJECTS THAT FLY AND THE MYSTERIOUS STAR KIC 8462852 INTRIGUING SIGHTING: In November 1996, a group of Pawan Hans aeronautical engineers reported seeing a UFO – a reddish green object would appear in the early morning

sky and then mysteriously let off a smaller object. This was near Lokhandwala complex in Kandivali East. The sighting, which lasted for over 10 minutes, was reported to the local planetarium, which couldn’t carry out investigations owing to bad weather.

SKEPTICAL QUESTION: The audience, whether in India or abroad, have always been skeptical. The most common question is whether UFOs are actually of extra-terrestrial origin. To which, I say that there is no reason why they cannot be!

WHY THE US? Well, it is a fact that most sightings are reported from the US and I guess we must leave it there. The thing is, if UFOs

are showing up more in US skies then it is obviously the choice of aliens for reasons they know best.

HOT IN ASTROBIOLOGY: Presently, NASA Kepler Space Mission is finding earth-size planets by the dozens each month. Some of these planets

appear to support life. For instance, star KIC 8462852 has ‘objects’ orbiting it causing it to dim by roughly 20%. This amount of dimming

is unheard of. In comparison, if Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system, was orbiting

KIC 8462852 then it would block its light only by about 1%. There is something very

peculiar going on around KIC 8462852 – and it is possible that these objects are actually evidence of alien cosmic engineering – done to optimize extraction of solar energy from the star.

Pushkar G Vaidya | SCIENTIST, HEAD,INDIAN ASTROBIOLOGY RESEARCH CENTRE

LOST IN TRANSLATION: A still from Broken Tide

LOCAL SCRIPT: From cinematic villages to Van Gogh impersonators, Stray Factory's Anthology is an interesting mix of stories

DAY 1: SATURDAY, JULY 210am | Introductory djembe workshop by Ashok Kumar for actors

11.30am | What does art owe its audience? (panel discussion moderated by Nimi Ravindran)

3.30pm | From Scratch:Collaborative performance by Kumudha Bharathram and Kafeel Jafri

4.30pm | Open House – Theatre professionals will talk about how they got into theatre. This will be followed by a Q&A

6pm | Documenting theatre:Talk and screening by documentary filmmaker RV Ramani

7.30pm | Documentary theatre performance, Lady Anandi

DAY 2: SUNDAY, JULY 310am | Physical approach to building character, a workshop by Anita Santhanam

11am | Theatre beyond performance (panel discussion moderated by Vivek Madan)

3pm | Breaking News: 10 actors break down 10 news articles into stories and performance pieces

4.30pm | The Thing About Writing, talk by Abhishek Majumdar

6pm | In Conversation: Deepika Arwind talks to writer and co-founder of The Ladies Finger, Nisha Susan on feminism, writing and other fun things

7.30pm | Anthology: 5 award-winning short plays by Stray Factory, Chennai

CURTAINS UP

The second edition of Speaking of Theatre, a two-day confluence begins in the city today