I've been meaning to see this play 'When God said Cheers,' for the longest time. Finally, last night, I got around to indulging myself. The cast included the director/actor, Cyrus Dastur, a childhood friend and the greatly and rightly venerated Tom Alter. The play debates the philosophical existence of god and if he does exist indeed, is he omnipotent and omniscient as we've all been trained to believe, or is he, in the words of the equally venerated Woody Allen, 'an underachiever?'
The easy-to-relate-to setting of a chance meeting of an average Joe with god in a pub, is something that we could either scoff at or choose to believe, in order to get to the larger argument of his much-debated existence and much-maligned powers. The play was primarily in Hindi with English supporting the Bertrand Russell-like philosophies, which are best left untempered and in English. Both actors, Cyrus who played the mortal man and Tom who played god, had great energy which leaped off the stage, to cast an electric net over an audience that hopefully pocketed their prejudices for a short while and tried to see life from the other side of the river. For me personally, it was a secret personal triumph. I've often been accused of being irreverent about religion and even about god. I've resisted pandering to religious rituals and ceremonies and scriptures and while I think the bible or the quran or the torah or any other religious text has great literary value, to me they are sources of reading entertainment. I do not for one moment, believe that they can take away man's ability to be cruel or his desire to be kind. Surely we cannot be living in the world we live in and think these books have any power or sway in themselves. Religion is the most magical unlicensed weapon we have in the world today and god is the easiest guy/girl to blame. It's an old game, played out since the existence of man- whether you believe in evolution or not- the rules don't really change and neither do the results.
In an India which is deeply fractured by religions and gods and demons and finger-pointing so-called sages, this play is a breath of fresh yet prickly air. It's not easy digestion for the average Indian who consults his thirty thousand odd gods before he makes a phone call, nor is it easy to digest for a country whose Indian name's origin can be traced back to mythology.
If you are fond of thinking, go see it when you get a chance.
The easy-to-relate-to setting of a chance meeting of an average Joe with god in a pub, is something that we could either scoff at or choose to believe, in order to get to the larger argument of his much-debated existence and much-maligned powers. The play was primarily in Hindi with English supporting the Bertrand Russell-like philosophies, which are best left untempered and in English. Both actors, Cyrus who played the mortal man and Tom who played god, had great energy which leaped off the stage, to cast an electric net over an audience that hopefully pocketed their prejudices for a short while and tried to see life from the other side of the river. For me personally, it was a secret personal triumph. I've often been accused of being irreverent about religion and even about god. I've resisted pandering to religious rituals and ceremonies and scriptures and while I think the bible or the quran or the torah or any other religious text has great literary value, to me they are sources of reading entertainment. I do not for one moment, believe that they can take away man's ability to be cruel or his desire to be kind. Surely we cannot be living in the world we live in and think these books have any power or sway in themselves. Religion is the most magical unlicensed weapon we have in the world today and god is the easiest guy/girl to blame. It's an old game, played out since the existence of man- whether you believe in evolution or not- the rules don't really change and neither do the results.
In an India which is deeply fractured by religions and gods and demons and finger-pointing so-called sages, this play is a breath of fresh yet prickly air. It's not easy digestion for the average Indian who consults his thirty thousand odd gods before he makes a phone call, nor is it easy to digest for a country whose Indian name's origin can be traced back to mythology.
If you are fond of thinking, go see it when you get a chance.
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