Weeping for Delhi, Padma Shri Barry John

Delhi AQI 2024 - only the green is ‘healthy’

Silk has nothing on a peacock.

This morning, I ran in Delhi after months, and as I dropped down the short slope at the southern end of Panchshila Park, a peacock decided to cross the gravel path. Its blue neck feathers shimmered in the early light, a slither of iridescence as it disappeared into the undergrowth. Two days ago, we had walked in the rose garden opposite Delhi IIT, and Premila spotted a nilgai, a sturdy young buck feeding on fallen leaves.

It’s almost noon now, the time when I walked in Lodi Gardens yesterday. On the second day of this sunlit weekend, the AQI merely ‘Unhealthy’, its parklands will be filling with seekers of beauty and open spaces - young women pushing their digital pedometers to the beat of headphones, shy romancers stealing gazes at each other, a bunch of metallised balloons staking out a birthday party, an office group playing a clumsy game of catch, a father promising his 3 year-old, “Yes, we will see ducks and ducks’ Mamas and Papas, and grandfathers, and great-great-great-grandfathers.”

Ooph, Delhi can be beautiful. Especially in winter. But what use is beauty if you can’t experience it? George Berkeley, 18th century philosopher, asked the question that has the quality of a koan, “If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?” When I exile myself from Delhi every winter, an airfugee from AQI in the maroon zone, those parks disappear into the haze of my detachment.

It’s not easy to detach, even if you are wintering in Goa. I miss Delhi. I miss its parks, and the leafy avenues of Lutyens. I miss the theater, and evenings of music. I miss my family and friends, and the intellectual engagement of a city which has been my karmabhoomi for decades.

“Your karmabhoomi is now virtual, bro.”, Amit Varma consoled me, over chai in his living room, on a December night when Mumbai’s air was fouler than Delhi’s. “You can do your stuff on the cloud.”

The next morning, he invited two friends to breakfast, and we had a delicious adda, the intoxication of lively minds, of the experiences of several lifetimes engaging and enriching each other. This was like some cruel joke to remind me that the virtual is still a hazy simulacrum for the real, the life-in-the-flesh of a throbbing, vital, and beautiful city.

Pardon me, then, if I look onto the plants gleaming on our terrace garden, our living room washed in the warm light of a Delhi winter-as-it-should-be, and cry for a city that is largely lost to AQI.

Padma Shri Barry John

I woke to news on the family Whatsapp group that Soniya Nityanand, the youngest of our cousins, has been awarded the Padma Shri.

Dr. Soniya Nityanand, now Vice Chancellor of her alma mater, the King George’s Medical University, Lucknow.

Soniya, without whom I would have been lost to despair as my sister, her beloved cousin Kanika, battled a vicious attack of Covid at a time when Delhi’s hospitals were choking. Soniya’s telemedicine kept patient and caretaker going through a series of setbacks and unexpected developments, and helped me help my sister back to good health.

Soniya is the epitome of compassion and patience, a pioneer in bone marrow transplants, and from my limited engagement with her professional life, a brave and fearless administrator. I am glad the powers-that-be agree.

Not much later this morning, a Whatsapp from a theatre friend alerted me to the news that Barry John was also on the Republic Day honours list.

I first heard of Barry John from Kanika, probably in 1971, when this slim, good-looking, somewhat enigmatic Englishman was recruited to the Convent of Jesus and Mary, to teach elocution to her class. Not long after, Joy Michael, my first theatre teacher, brought him in to direct a children’s play for the Young Stager’s Club, The Snow Queen. We engaged briefly during a production of Habeas Corpus a few years later, but for the better part of the 1970s, I watched from the sidelines, as Barry worked magic on Delhi’s theatre scene.

His impact reached well beyond the stage. Theatre Action Group - TAG - became a magnet for young Delhi people who sensed a shift in the cultural and political climate of the world, and wanted part of it. Rock music, flower power, peace, free love, and yes, drugs. This was a time of deep transformation, and liberation, across the world. TAG became an umbrella from under which to observe, and shape this world. Each in their own time, a whole generation of cultural practitioners stepped out of TAG’s eclectic umbrella, and took their place in the world - Mira Nair, famed director of Salaam Bombay and Mississippi Masala, Siddharth Basu, who produced Kaun Banegaa Crorepati, contemporary composer Param Vir, theater director and actor Lillette Dubey, and her sister, Lushan Dubey…

I re-engaged with Barry in 1981, when he staged Amadeus, a lavish production whose gorgeous sets were dressed by crafts doyenne, Laila Tyabji. Siddharth Basu played Mozart, Lillette Dubey his wife, and my partner-to-be of many decades, Sanjoy Roy, never fails to remind us that he, all of 19 years old, explored Lillette’s skirts on the stage of Kamani auditorium. Some of the edge of the previous decade was gone by now, but TAG found a new stride in the eighties, and with a relentless stream of productions, Barry continued to attract wave after wave of talent. I worked on stage, tried to balance the cheque-books, and lit a raft of plays, with antique equipment that hissed with electricity. One of my early colleagues was Lynne Fernandez, who went on to light productions for the fabled Odissi dancer, Protima Bedi, and now runs her dance gurukul, Nrityagram.

In 1984, TAG joined hands with Lady Shriram College, to stage the musical, Annie Get Your Gun. The prospect of access to the grounds of this all-girls institution sent pheromone alerts all the way to Delhi University, and our audition spaces were flooded with young men. One of them was an aspiring actor with a slightly jerky stage manner, but a strong sense of manifest destiny. Barry was quick to sense his potential, and in the seasons that followed, Shahrukh Khan played lead in a series of TAG productions.

And then there was Manoj Bajpayee, undeterred by NSD’s refusal to admit him, who worked with our Theatre in Education program, even while crafting the most arresting theatre on the Mandi House scene.

Later that decade, Kanika and I started working with street children at New Delhi’s railway station. TAG veteran Cecil Qadir was the first face of our work on the street, and over a few months that summer, built an easy connection with a small group of boys he assembled every morning. Three years ago, I wrote:

For all the camaraderie and the building of trust, somewhere Cecil felt he was reaching a dead end, in understanding the emotional lives of these children, those dark holes into which no other hearts would be allowed. We turned to our theatre guru, Barry John. Perhaps a series of workshops, where the first-person could become the third, a projection of narrative, rather than a scary intimacy? Delhi’s Triveni Kala Sangam gave us their amphitheatre for several weeks, and with his slow magic, Barry crafted a searing piece of theatre, Jeevan ki Gaadi.

When the raw sparks of those brave little lives lit the stage on a dark Delhi night, a thousand hearts were touched, and we were able, for the first time, to gather funds; to employ a teacher and another social worker, to help with medical expenses, to buy warm clothes and blankets. With pen and ink, Barry created a logo of a little child studying under a street lamp. Our work now had a name, Nukkad, or street corner. Rather than register a new entity, Nukkad became an arm of TAG.

But it was an arm with little connection to the rest of the body. We were rehearsing a play, perhaps a bedroom comedy, when I realised that our young actors knew nothing of these other, younger, lives, and the work we were doing with them. One evening, we stopped work early, and asked Cecil to talk about Nukkad for half an hour. There were tears in many eyes as he ended with the words, “To Sleep, Perchance to Dream”, from Hamlet.

We adopted those words for our work. They went on mailers and fund-raising brochures. They crept into our early discourse about where we were headed. They reminded us that we must reach beyond the obvious, of safe places to sleep, nutritious food, health and education. That we must create spaces where young minds could dream, and summon the organisational energy to help some of those dreams come true.

Given our early success with theatre, and our connections to the performing arts, the children of Nukkad were drawn by the stage, and a play became an annual fixture. A couple of years later, another TAG alumnus, Mira Nair, released her stellar debut, Salaam Bombay, and we collaborated to leverage the success of the film into more funding for street kids. The Salaam Baalak Trust* was born, and a few years later, Nukkad adopted the name and form of this independent trust.

As the eighties came to a close, Barry and I parted company, not on the best of terms. But that is water under the bridge, and I am only one of scores - perhaps hundreds - of people that recognise the deep influence Barry had on our lives.

Behind each of the names on this year’s awards, including that of my statistics professor and tutor, Dr. KL Krishna, is a lifetime of work, dedication, and inspiration for hundreds, maybe thousands. Of such lives is a nation crafted.

On this Republic Day, Barry, thanks for helping to shape our lives. Your Padma Shri is richly deserved.

• https://www.salaambaalaktrust.com/