Close your eyes and let your mind wander back to a time when slumber found you on the terrace, cradled within the tender arms of your beloved parents. In those cherished days of electricity outage, under the moonlit sky, a myriad of stories unfolded, lovingly narrated by parents and grandparents. Reviving that wistful nostalgia in the template of a teleplay, director-actor Seema Pahwa brings Koi Baat Chale — a series of dramatic readings of six stories from notable writers we have heard in our childhood days.
Viewers can see Saadat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh and Hatak being masterfully narrated by Manoj Pahwa and Sadiya Siddiqui, Harishankar Parsai’s Ek Film Katha narrated by Gopal Datt and Manto’s Mammad Bhai brought to life by the talented voice of Vineet Singh. The series also has time-tested writer Munshi Premchand’s popular short stories Gulli Danda and Idgah narrated by Vivaan Shah and Vinay Pathak. Vivaan shares what got him interested in the project, “Firstly, the opportunity to work with Seema is huge and secondly, the chance to inhabit the work of Premchand, who is one of my favourite writers of all time.” For Vivaan, Munshi Premchand is the “poet of the earth!” where he lauds the writer’s profound love for Mother Earth and its fellow people. “His descriptive flights of the imagination, his way of invoking the spiritualism of the cosmos, the delicacy of nature, and also the beautiful and moving evocations of childhood and the sanctity of the playing field are admirable! These are all characteristics that are singular and specific to Premchand. He is truly our Tolstoy; a weaver of human parables,” the actor shares.
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Vivaan has a natural flair for storytelling, being born to stalwarts like Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah. The 33-yearold actor appeared in Hindi films like Saat Khoon Maaf, Bombay Velvet, A Suitable Boy and more. He also bears an interest in literature having penned his first novel Living Hell. He weighs on the future of theatre, believing that the tradition of the tele-play and digital theatre is not something new. “It has existed since the late 60s and 70s with the National Theatre in England and Playhouse 90 in the 50s in America that would televise live theatre. Laurence Olivier filmed a lot of Shakespeare’s plays for both film and televisoon. At Sarvodaya (a famous video store in Bandra), they had many DVDs of old teleplays and filmed plays, and I would watch them religiously. I learned a great deal from studying the form and the medium.”
Koi Baat Chale is streaming on Zee5.
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