COMMUNITY NEWS
About 250 people watched a Hindi play, 8 Ghante (Eight
Hours) at the Tabard Theater in San Jose, California, June
12. The play was by the Bay Area theater group Naatak. The
90-minute play was directed by Harish Sunderam Agastya,
written by Sujit Saraf and produced by Siva Kollipara. It
was first performed by Naatak in 1997. Since then, the
witty, fast-paced satire has been staged across the United
States, at the National School of Drama in Delhi and in
almost every major city in northern India.
Naatak was formed in 1995 by a group of Silicon Valley
employees in San Francisco’s Bay Area. The group now has
300 registered members and 50 active members.
“The Bay Area lacks creative Indian theater,” said
Agastya, who was born in Kerala and raised in Dubai,
United Arab Emirates, and Mumbai. “We have a very large
Indian-American population now, yet the exposure to
Indian arts is restricted to something like Bharata
Natayam or people visiting Bollywood shows.”
He said the group is trying to get literary works from
Indian writers and producing them in America. Most of
Naatak’s plays are in Hindi, he said, adding, “we do some
plays in English as well and if we do non-English we pro-
vide super tittles. The aim is to provide awareness and edu-
cate people about themes relevant to these kind of cul-
tures.”
8 Ghante is about two typists who have spent their
entire life typing on postcards addresses from a telephone
directory. The play revolves around two artists and their
mundane life as depicted by their predictable 9 to 5 schedule.
“It’s the most meaningless and mundane job in the world.
And they do this for 30 years,” said Agastya. “They work in
a company that is a form of junk mail marketing and sell-
ing something. They do not know what they do, who it
serves; it’s a meaningless job.”
The play also showed the bittersweet relationship
between Pandey and Verma as they share conversations
during work. Verma is married with two children, Pandey
is a bachelor living with his elderly mother. Both are from
middle-class India of the 1960s and 1970s.
“Even though it is set in 1967 in Delhi, if you see their
career, it is very relevant to the Silicon Valley professionals
working today,” Agastya said. “Instead of typing on a type-
writer for their entire lives, here people type on keyboards.
We want people to leave the theater thinking: Am I also a
Pandey or Verma?”
Abha Singhvi of Redwood City, California, said she has
been attending Nataak’s plays for the last six years.
“They do a great job, I enjoy the plays and also they drive
home a point. They pick topics from a decade ago or a cen-
Naatak presents a new
perspective to Silicon Valley lives
A scene from the play
COURTESY: NEHA KUMAR
tury ago and connect back to the current scenario,” said
Singhvi.
Manisha Sharma, who had come from Sunnyvale,
California, said Naatak’s plays are simple, creative, and
sometimes controversial.
A CORRESPONDENT
Budhendra Bhaduri, a scientist from the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Oakridge, Tennessee, has been named one
of the two University of Tennessee-Battelle
Memorial Institute (UT-Batelle) corporate
fellows in recognition of his outstanding
contributions to scientific and technical
fields.
UT-Battelle, LLC, was established in
2000 as a private not-for-profit company
for the managing and operating the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory for the
Department of Energy.
Bhaduri is the leader of the Geographic
Budhendra Bhaduri
Information Science and Technology
Group at the ORNL, which is under the
Department of Energy. He is internationally renowned for his role in conceiving,
designing and implementing novel geo-computational methods to help solve a
variety of national and global problems in
energy, environment and national security.
He is also a founding member of the
Department of Energy’s Geospatial Science
Steering Committee. His primary responsibilities include conceiving, designing, and
implementing innovative geocomputation-al methods and algorithms to solve a variety of national and global problems involving population dynamics modeling, natural
resource studies, transportation modeling,
critical infrastructure protection, and disaster management.
Bhaduri has extensive experience in novel
implementation of geospatial science and
technology in other areas of sustainable
development research including human
dimensions of critical infrastructure,
urbanization and watershed impacts, and
energy resource analysis. In 2009, he was
appointed to the Mapping Science
Committee of the National Academy of
Sciences/National Research Council. He is
a member of the Science Dean’s Leadership
Council at Purdue University, the
Transportation Research Board’s
Committee on Geographic Information
Science and Applications, and the Strategic
Highway Research Program Expert Task
Group on Acquisition of Roadway
Information.
