Bloom : Pronounce it like an explosion

“The agony of slipping back into the position of namelessness is quite the same for all the genders,” writes Tapan Mozumdar.

Bloom! Pronounce it as if it is an explosion, feel your tongue get the sparks, your thorax reverberating with echoes of the last alphabet, your navel raising a deep whimper in memory of the umbilical cord that lost you.

Bloom! Feel the chords that you wind around yourself and pray that you don’t be an Abhimanyu, that you have the time and wherewithal to get out of the network.

Bloom! Hope that when you slip out of the amniotic fluid into this strange land with the fellow beings split into the fragments of birth status and gender, you get a reception worth the beauty of your being.

Anushka Nair wrote and performed this solo theatrical piece with Her in mind, though ‘she is he, and he is she’, she postulates. But the churn of tearing open the web of identity we are born with, the rigour to rinse our minds conditioned with the biases we grow up with, the joy of finding oneself in that ‘in between’ place where one matters, the agony of slipping back into the position of namelessness is quite the same for all the genders. Bravo Anushka for letting your mind be known to us. It is beautiful.

Anushka is a hard working artiste, intelligent at that. Sure, with practice and experience she will know to harness the energy from the dark void of the auditorium and revel in that all through. Her graceful movements will learn to mimic the fluidity of ether, her voice will trace her thoughts with more precision. Those are technical matters of the world that she will marvel in, for sure.

The aesthetics and the cerebral are her forte. May she Bloom into a thousand avatars through her creative career.

Thanks Nishu Dikshit and her Quiver Productions for organising this festival with the young performers. Those who nurture arts, save the future, it is said. Her efforts will let Bengaluru and the world of performance blessed with million more such evenings. All the best!

The event was organised on 25th August at Alliance Franciase de Bangalore.

Tapan Mozumdar is a Bengaluru-based writer and storyteller.