But since the initial fervour has worn down, it only makes sense to go back to this one-off fantastical event and review it for what it was truly worth. The first three pieces of the performance incidentally had one and the same purpose and i.e. caricature. Each piece, given its own distinct theme seemed to make a social comment albeit in a humourous and burlesque like manner.

SAHA KALAKAR (Hindi), written by Makrand Deshpande and directed by Rajat Kapoor was the first piece of the performance. Heeba Shah, Sadiya Siddiqui, Konkona Sen Sharma, Ranvir Shorey and Vinay Pathak were dressed outlandishly enough to get the first twitters amongst the audience going. But their strange costumes and grossly coloured wigs were not without purpose. At its comic best, the piece was an accomplished mockery of Hindi cinema and the power-game that it sets into motion.

The next piece titled TERE MERE BEACH MEIN (mark the pun) was in Marathi. Written by Satish Manwar and directed by Sandesh Kulkarni, the piece is a travesty of the endless expectations that middle-class, urban couples suffer from. Each spouse wants the other to do things s/he is not accustomed to or worse be like some one else's spouse. So two couples played by Nikhil Ratnaparkhi, Veena Jamkar, Ketan Karande and Kshti Jog are found marking their time on a beach, vying for attention and debating who's got the better deal. The piece while making fun of stereotypical likes and dislikes such as when Ketan Karande hugs Kshiti Jog tight and tells her that she is supposed to like the smell of his sweat, also conveyed the playwright's sensitivity to the modern malaise of nothing is ever satisfactory enough.

OM IMPROVEMENT (English) written by Farhad Sorabjee and directed by Sunil Shanbag had a fashionable and modern Sadhu, enacted by Zafar Karachiwala. His voluptuous handmaiden, played by Lovleen Mishra, supports the 'all-knowing' Sadhu's discourse. The two young boys who come to listen to him are played by Joy Sengupta and Sameer Sheikh. It is clear at the onset what the playwright intends to do. Think of the Sadhu as a modern version of a Ponga Pandit whose frequent visitors are the troubled rich and famous. The piece does not offer any substantial critique but it does have the tongue-in-cheek humour that calls for a surprising end. Zafar Karachiwala as the 'saffron clothed knowledge personified' gave a delightful performance.

Madhu Rye's ARRE FAREH RATI KARE (Gujarati) directed by Manoj Shah was disappointing. However its team of actors managed to an extent to redeem the oddities apparent in the text. The piece, which starts off with a group of characters rehearsing for a play, ends with the characters' finding their true repressed selves; the reason of conflict being a love triangle. Clever but hardly engaging, the script merely offered actors like Disha Vakhani an opportunity to display their histrionics. Rye seems to have a penchant for the Freudian stuff such as the unconscious and its manifestations. His earlier play SURA ANE SATYAJIT (not yet produced) too took recourse to the theme of the unconscious as harbouring the dark and the dangerous.