Latest news with #Karnad
New Indian Express
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
The great Indian wedding: Girish Karnad's 'Wedding Album' to be performed
Even as the mythologically inspired, dramatic worlds of playwright and actor Girish Karnad's Nagamandala, Hayavadana, Yayati, and Tughlaq continue to capture the attention and imaginations of playgoers and practitioners alike, with regular performances in the city, a staging of Wedding Album is, perhaps, a rare sight. One of the last plays he penned before his demise in 2019, Wedding Album will be performed at Bangalore International Centre on July 9 and Ranga Shankara on July 30. 'While Karnad was known for his mythological plays, he wrote urban stories in contemporary settings towards the end of his life. In this one, he takes on the institution of weddings and how the whole thing, with cultural sanction, has become absurd and nobody's questioning it,' explains play director Kishore Acharya. Wedding Album gives a glimpse into the house of a middle-class family in the 2000s, looking for a perfect match for their 21-year-old daughter. Their only condition: he must be in the US (United States). Through the ridiculous scenarios arising from the set-up and as the relationships between members of the family are unravelled, Karnad satirises arranged marriage, and the institution at the centre of all the chaos: caste. 'You're talking about an educated, upper-middle-class, 'upper caste' home. It's absurd that in the pursuit of getting their daughter married to someone in the US, they are willing to let go of a lot of things. The whole thing is hinging on the fact that the girl will pack up her life here and go live with someone she's met 24 hours ago. The only tick mark is that he's from the same caste and class,' says Acharya, adding that the play delves into the inter-generational relationships within the family. 'There are no heroes or moments of rebellion by younger characters. In the end, he shows that there is no difference and that we haven't evolved further. A lot of people can interpret it as hopeless, but it is showing a mirror to society.'
New Indian Express
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
I'm coming to realise what Appa wanted me to learn: Raghu Karnad, son of Girish Karnad, remembering the latter
The only book he had ever insisted that we read – putting copies in our hands – was the Mahabharata.' – Raghu and Radha Karnad, Afterword, This Life At Play. In 1959, when Girish Karnad was about to leave for Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he felt compelled to read the epics and the Puranas before his departure. He had grown up watching these stories performed by lamplight, by Yakshagana and Company Natak troupes. Now he reached for C Rajagopalachari's concise but complete versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This is the decision that would eventually lead him to write his first play, Yayati. Every aspect of this play took him by surprise, as Aparna Dharwadker notes, 'That it was a play and not a cluster of angst-ridden poems, that it was written in Kannada instead of English, and that it used an episode from the Mahabharata as its narrative basis.' This choice 'nailed me to my past,' Karnad said. It set him on a path of drawing narratives from myth, history and folklore, which dominated his playwriting for the next four decades. In the myth of Yayati, a king is cursed with decrepit old age, and Puru, his youngest son, agrees to bear the curse on his behalf. In This Life At Play, Karnad recalls, 'I was excited by the story of Yayati, where a son exchanges his youth with his father's old age. The situation was both dramatic and tragic. But the question that bothered me even as I was finishing the story was: If the son had been married, what would the wife do? Would she have accepted this unnatural arrangement?' This imaginary character's response became the seed of his first play, written at the age of 22: 'This was the first scene that formed in front of my eyes: the confrontation between Yayati and Chitralekha. ... As I thought about it, the rest of the play began to take shape around this climax. I did not feel as if I was writing a play… It was as if a spirit had entered me.' At the time, Karnad was a young man facing his own burdensome questions: Would he return to India when he was done at Oxford? What were his responsibilities, as a young man, to his own father, his family, or his country? When Karnad wrote the play, he could relate to the son, Puru, and the weight of obligation he feels in the story. When he read the play again, much later in his own life, he found himself identifying with the desperation of the father.
Time of India
01-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Job losses: How AI has painfully disrupted dreams of young software engineering graduates
IT CEOs have indicated that AI-led productivity is changing the business model, with revenue growth and headcount growth being de-linked. 'The last couple of years, we have been challenging our teams on how you can deliver twice the revenue and half of the people,' said HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar in February. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads ( Originally published on May 31, 2025 ) As a story going viral recently recounts, back in the early 1990s, Infosys cofounder Nandan Nilekani had prodded and pestered actor and playwright Girish Karnad, a distant relative, to buy into the then-obscure software firm's told to journalist Rollo Romig, author of I Am on the Hit List: Murder and Myth-making in South India, Karnad eventually gave in and bought some shares of Infosys. Within 10 years, as Infosys—and India's burgeoning IT sector—g rew, the share prices skyrocketed and helped Karnad out of a lower-middle class living to greater comforts, like a house of his There is no other word that encapsulates what C++, Java and Python did for India and millions of folks like Karnad. Beyond shareholders, zeros and ones carried with them the aspirations of millions of youth who gained not just employment, but a living that lifted their families out of the lower middle-class trap, powered by fancy salaries, lucrative stock options and promise of foreign far so good. Then, out of nowhere, came the threat from artificial intelligence (AI). India's middle-class dreams, written in the promise of software, is now under threat from advancements of that very jobs that millions of students had taken for granted as an entry to a long and successful career aren't quite there anymore, and a thirty-year dream is starting to lose drastic shift is leaving a bloody trail of laid-off employees, changing job descriptions and under-skilled young (name changed), a techie in Bengaluru, is job hunting. This isn't the best time to be looking for one. But he does not have a choice as his company, a unicorn, fired him five months ago, along with close to a dozen last time he was looking for a job was in 2018 when he was a final-year engineering student. Back then, all that the unicorns he was interviewing for wanted was solid programming six years, he was laid off and there are more things he is worried about than getting the basics right. 'Even if I get a job, how long can I hold on before the company decides otherwise? Is this going to be the end of my career?'Things are worse for junior developers just entering the workforce where AI tools can do a much better job. Their days are now marked by anxiety, fear and insecurity that threatens careers, lest they don't keep up with the change, and at times even when they (name changed), a manual tester in a Bengaluru-based IT services firm a decade ago, remembers how worried they were when automation was introduced. 'We were worried that our jobs would be lost,' she never came to pass in the five years she spent in the firm before moving to consulting. But today, testing is one of the areas seeing the most automation, and others such as frontand back-end development are soon likely to of this, naturally, is leading to mental health Singh Saluja, president of IT professionals' welfare association Nascent IT Employees Senate (NITES), has been seeing increasing anxiety in young professionals with up to five years of experience, who were beginning to feel they were being gradually sidelined or replaced.'Many are unsure whether their job will still exist in the next six months or a year,' Saluja says.'Every single project that you do, they track how many AI tools or AI integrations you are using. They don't always say it, but the bottom line is that if you don't, your job is at risk,' says long Reddit threads, software developers have been sharing how their department heads emphasise using AI tools and are removing teams that were doing documentation, something that has since been easily the moment it is each to their stay relevant, many are upskilling and learning AI-first thinking and how to create workflows using AI. Platforms such as Scaler Academy, Newton School and 100xEngineers are seeing huge demand for their online courses on AI and ML.'It is a six-month weekend course, which is a mix of lectures and hands-on exercises,' says Sridev Ramesh, cofounder, new-a g e schools profit, engineering colleges that mushroomed across the country over the last few decades are just not equipped for this transition, and that is resulting in students charting their own Rachit (last name withheld to protect identity), a second-year computer science student. He was clear that regular engineering colleges might not help. After preparing for IIT-JEE, he decided to pursue a four-year undergraduate degree with Newton School of Technology, which focuses on avid programmer from Class 8, he taught himself Java and then Python, and is currently interning at one of the top AI startups in India and in his words 'is loving it'.As Nishant Chandra, CEO, Newton School, points out, the ecosystem is changing fast and students need to change with it. Chandra reckons that unfortunately about 90% of the colleges are not forward-looking, and that will impact the (name changed), a third-year engineering student, and his batchmates often discuss what AI would do to their prospects. 'We are still a year from when we have to face it, but at present, we are unsure what we can do,' he who hails from a tier-3 town in Kerala, is doing computer science in Coimbatore. Ask him if the college is taking additional initiatives to equip them, and he is confused. 'We have not heard anything from the college. Maybe we will see something before we start placements next year,' he by the time reality hits, it might be too late for students like Sharma, CEO, TeamLease Digital, says most engineering graduates are not completely ready for AI jobs.'More than 60% of these students don't have enough hands-on knowledge and experience,' says Sharma, adding that beyond college degrees, what's needed is certifications in AI, cloud, security, or data science, working on real projects (like sharing code on GitHub), and joining hackathons or inter nships. 'Students who keep learning and can show real projects or skills will have the best chance of getting hired in today's job market.'That's not going to be easy.'We can't just learn one or two skills and assume that it will take us through the next five years,' says Savita Hor tikar, global head of talent acquisition at the AI company Fractal, adding that adapting to the new reality of 'continuous learning' is often harder for experienced professionals than CEOs have indicated that AI-led productivity is changing the business model, with revenue growth and headcount growth being de-linked. 'The last couple of years, we have been challenging our teams on how you can deliver twice the revenue and half of the people,' said HCLTech CEO C Vijayakumar in means AI taking over grunt work and humans focusing on strategy, ethics and innovation, says Roop Kaistha, regional managing director-APAC at recruitment firm is going to complicate is home to the second largest pool of software developers in the world, with 5.8 million professionals. It also produces around 1.5 million fresh engineers every year. However, just 10% of them have the ability to secure jobs, according to a TeamLease the question of higher-level output is going to be a pipe dream unless both the individual and the system change their companies and institutions need to work together and create courses that match what businesses actually use now, says TeamLease's Pai, director of Takshashila Institution, a centre for research and education on public policy, says that as long as companies and workers are prepared to learn, adapt and adjust, India will benefit from the AI revolution just as it has benefited from previous turns of the tech Sherikar, head of corporate development, Sonata Software, says self-skilling has also become nonnegotiable with AI-readiness now being a baseline expectation.'Skilling programmes must evolve from being theoretical to being outcome-focused, anchored in the realities of a tech-driven, rapidly changing business landscape,' she says.'While we have a number of skilling programmes underway, I think they are too disaggregated,' Sangeeta Gupta, SVP & chief strategy officer of Nasscom, recently told ET. 'You need a much more top-down thinking on skilling, not just for the top-end of AI, which is all the data scientists and that kind of work, but how will the workingage population be using AI more effectively in the day-to-day operations?'Until that happens, the pain will A Damodaran, professor, economics, IIM-Bangalore, says, 'We have seen automation disrupting businesses historically. The biggest was textiles and then factories, where automation led to job losses. In factories, before automation, many of the workers were handling hazardous materials, and nobody voluntarily did that. And as history would show, people found other jobs. That will happen again.'Unfortunately for the next generation of millions who were betting on software jobs, history will unfold far too slowly.
Time of India
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani's 'irritating' advice later became actor-writer Girish Karnad's best investment ever
Girish Karnad , a towering figure in Indian theatre, was a multifaceted personality — playwright, actor, writer, and activist — whose contribution to the cultural landscape of India remains unparalleled. He passed away in 2019 at the age of 81, leaving behind a legacy that spanned literature, cinema, and public discourse. Widely celebrated for his artistic achievements, Karnad was also a Jnanpith Award recipient and a Rhodes Scholar, accolades that underscored his intellectual depth and creative prowess. However, beyond the stage and screen, Karnad had an interesting, lesser-known connection to India's IT boom through an early investment in Infosys. The was shared by Rollo Romig, the author of "I Am on the Hit List Murder and Myth-making in South India" while sharing the book excerpt on a news portal. During the company's formative years, Karnad was encouraged by Nandan Nilekani , one of Infosys ' co-founders and a distant relative, to invest in its shares. Both of them also hailed from Dharwad in Karnataka. Initially reluctant and disinterested in the world of finance and investment, Karnad was eventually persuaded to buy some shares for personal and familial reasons. What began as a reluctant gesture turned out to be a life-altering decision. 'I said, no, I don't want to buy shares, I'm not interested in investment,' Karnad told Rollo Romig. 'He (Nilekani) said, take it, take it. I got very irritated; I said to my wife, look, this Nandan Nilekani is irritating me. I told him I don't want shares, but he won't let go. And my wife gave a very typical small-town answer: she said, you know, he has such nice parents, they're such loving relatives to us, why don't you buy a few shares? So I bought it for family reasons. And suddenly within ten years it had become the miracle firm, and those shares paid for this house. That really pulled me up from being a lower-middle-class family man to a comfortable economic frame. I wish I'd invested more.' Infosys went public in June 1993 with shares priced at Rs. 95. Over the years, the company's valuation skyrocketed, and it issued multiple bonus shares, enriching early investors. Karnad's modest investment in Infosys eventually brought him considerable financial comfort. He once reflected that the returns from those shares were substantial enough to help him buy a house, significantly improving his financial standing and offering him a level of economic stability he hadn't experienced before. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Mountain Gear for Extreme Conditions Trek Kit India Learn More Undo While Karnad benefited from the IT revolution in an unexpected way, he also remained deeply thoughtful about its broader social consequences. He observed how the rapid transformation of Bangalore into a tech hub had left many local residents feeling alienated. Despite these reservations, Karnad maintained a personal and professional connection with Nilekani. In 2014, he publicly supported Nilekani during his Lok Sabha election campaign, when the Infosys co-founder contested on a Congress party ticket. Karnad's journey into the world of drama began during his time at Oxford, where he penned his first play, Yayati . At just 26, he wrote Tughlaq , a powerful commentary on idealism and disillusionment, which went on to become one of the most significant works in Indian theatre. He later wrote numerous acclaimed plays in Kannada, cementing his place as a major literary force.
Indian Express
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Read these 6 Girish Karnad works before you say you know Indian theatre
(Written By Prachi Mishra) Girish Karnad, wore many hats, and he wore them well. While many readers may recognize Karnad for his roles in films like Ek Tha Tiger, Chalk N Duster, and Shivaay, for him, these were merely commercial commitments, undertaken for financial reasons. His true passion and creative soul were always rooted in the world of theatre and literature. On this day, May 19, we remember the man who taught us that mythology is not dead, that history is not static, and that theatre is not just performance. Born in 1938, Karnad was not just a playwright. He was a time-traveler, a translator of gods into men and kings into symbols, a mirror-holder who turned epics into existential crises and legends into living, breathing truths. His pen didn't write plays, it set the stage on fire. Let's take a look into some of his literary works. Tughlaq, considered the chef-d'oeuvre of Karnad, is not simply about a medieval ruler. It is about every utopianist whose dream turned sour. Set in the 14th century, yet it seems fresh from the contemporary politics' perspective. It follows Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq, a visionary who thought too far ahead of his time. But the brilliance dims and the dream fades pretty soon, and the king is left stranded, exiled in his own mind. It highlights how there is a fine line between insanity and geniusness of a ruler's mind. Exploring the themes of reality vs idealism, the play traversed through concepts of idealism turning into despair and tyranny. The dreams of Tughlaq having a secular India came crashing through when hit with the religious orthodoxy of his own people. 'I am not mad. I am merely a dreamer.' And in this line lies the tragedy of every misunderstood genius. 'Where is the mind in a human being – in the head or in the body?' Published in the year 1971, Hayavadana uses Yakshagana (a traditional folk theatre form of Karnataka) elements in style and presentation. Karnad spins a tale from Indian and Western mythologies and turns it into a carnival of questions. The play revolves around the story of Padmini and her two lovers Devadutta and Kapila. But, it's not simply any other love triangle, it comes with a major twist. Two men, one woman, a divine mix-up of heads and bodies, but what follows is not confusion, but clarity. Who is Padmini's true husband – the man with her husband's head or her lover's body? The half-man, half-horse character of Hayavadana becomes more than myth, it becomes a metaphor for fractured identity in a fragmented world. Along with comic elements scattered throughout, the play explores the theme of absurdity and irony. With the straightforward line, 'Perfection is a negation of life', Karnad presents to its readers the philosophical depth of this story. 'You can kill a man. But can you kill an idea?' One of Karnad's most thought-provoking works, Taledanda (literal translation beheading) takes us back to the 12th century, to the Bhakti movement and the radical Lingayat sect. But in Karnad's hands, it's not a history lesson, it's a blazing elegy. Set during the rise of Basavanna's egalitarian philosophy, the play questions caste, orthodoxy, and fanaticism. Trying to marry a dalit girl, Kalyana, a passionate reformer, just sees the tragic collapse of the so-called structured society. Published in the year 1990, at a time when India grappled with communal politics, it felt like a mirror and a warning. The flowers of reform withered and the fire of hatred burned. The play ends with a tragic realization that radical social change invites violent backlash, raising the question – Can true reform happen without a price? 'Let me carry his soul to the heavens, even if my own burns in hell.' This line from the play will surely strike some chords even in the hard hearted people. Karnad picks a very simple plot, a tale of brothers, betrayal, ego, and endurance; emotions that are universally human. But, what sets it alight is his theatrical genius. The setting is a seven-year fire sacrifice to bring rain. But the real drought is in the hearts of men. The story revolves around Paravasu, the head priest, his father Raibhya, his brother Aravasu, and Yavakri, who returns after years of penance for divine knowledge. 'The fire burns because we feed it with lies.' With this powerful statement, Karnad tries to present critique of the hypocrisy within ritualistic religion. The play doesn't preach. It performs. It chants. It burns slowly, and when the rain comes, it isn't water, it's pure catharsis. The play later got adapted into a film titled 'Agni Varsha' (2002), directed by Arjun Sajnani and starring Nagarjuna, Jackie Shroff, Raveena Tandon in lead roles. Before the world knew Karnad through his awards, and before he achieved his fame, there was Yayati. Karnad was just 23 when he wrote his debut play. He reimagines the story of a king from the Mahabharata who traded his son's youth for his own aging body. But the king doesn't grow wise. The son doesn't gain enlightenment. The wife, Chitralekha, dies not for love, but for dignity. When realization dawned upon Yayati, he expressed that, 'Desire is like a fire. The more you feed it, the more it hungers.' Through this metaphorical statement Karnad underscores the unending nature of human wants. The play delves into alienation, existentialism, and intergenerational trauma, themes that now dominate literature, but he did this way ahead of the time in the year 1961. Simply put, Karnad's Yayati is not a myth retold; it's a myth re-lived. Karnad's posthumously published memoir, This Life at Play, offers a candid window into his mind. The book covers his childhood in Sirsi and Dharwad, family life, especially his relationship with his mother, his time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, the making of his early plays, including Yayati, Tughlaq, and Hayavadana and especially his involvement in Indian theatre, cinema, and cultural institutions. All in all the book revealed the man who never feared complexity. A Rhodes Scholar who wrote in Kannada, an actor who stood at protests, a rationalist who dared to be spiritual, and a dramatist who became history. Also, we find a lot of behind the scenes or the insights into his creative process and how he strategized his work. 'Theatre gave me a life I had never imagined possible — a life at play.' This quote from the book beautifully explains his life as well as the title of this book. To conclude, Girish Karnad didn't just write plays, he sculpted mirrors of our existing society. He turned the stage into a battlefield, a confession, which always left the audience with a temple of thought, and his words still hold the same magic that it possessed years ago. (The author is an intern with The Indian Express)
