Hamid Bhashani on The Kashmir issue

Why sport needs to be playful

Ed Smith in Cricinfo


I'd like to make a case for sport. My argument ignores the usual theories - weight lost, arteries unclogged, endorphins released, friendships made, purpose gained, associations formed, communities knit together.


All true enough. But my theme is different. My focus is the value of play, within sport and also in life. Because it is usually perceived as the opposite of serious, we tend to trivialise play. In fact, play needs to be taken much more seriously.


I am making a deliberate distinction between merely "doing" sport and really "playing" sport. For it is possible to play sport unplayfully, joylessly going through the motions, merely acting out a prearranged plan, becoming a cog in a cold machine, becoming totally closed to instinct or mischief. Indeed, one of the ironies of the development of modern sport - both professional and, more depressingly, amateur - is that it has become progressively less playful.


There is, I think, a unique category of play, different and special: playful play. This is not, obviously, the exclusive preserve of sport - it is also central to good conversation, intellectual life, music and scientific invention. In my personal experience, however, I feel a great debt to sport in particular. Perhaps unusually for a professional sportsman, I am reflective, analytical and happy with long periods of solitude. Playing sport - really playing sport - was not only a counterpoint (and a pleasure). It has also been a catalyst.


My experience is backed up by academic research. I recently read Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation by the scientists Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin. I recommend it to sports fans and sceptics alike.


Much of the book is unconnected to sport. According to Bateson and Martin, play is "an evolved biological adaptation that enables the individual to escape from local optima and discover better solutions". They use the example of a squirrel swinging on a branch merely playfully, which by accident enables it to reach nuts that were previously inaccessible. So the change in behaviour becomes a learned modification; an activity that was apparently without purpose becomes all too useful. That is how kids learn, too, the authors propose: more playful children become creative adults.




The word "creative" has become a corporate cliché. Corporate life wants everyone to be creative, which is a bit like a coach wanting every batsman to score a hundred. Well, of course. But how? The link between creativity and playfulness is rarely accounted for. As the zoologist George Bartholomew concluded: "Creativity often appears to be some complex function of play… The most profoundly creative humans of course never lose this."


Alexander Fleming, who created the penicillin vaccine, was described, disapprovingly, by his boss as treating research like a game. When asked what he did, Fleming replied, "I play with microbes… it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something that nobody had thought of."


In contrast, "the meeting" - enforced boredom orchestrated by authority - is the most anti-playful invention known to man. Any event that is closed, bounded and explicitly humourless is almost certain to be uncreative. In calling a meeting, in the traditional sense, corporations increase the probability of not finding a solution.


Thinking about play has encouraged me to rethink certain aspects of sport. When I was still a professional player, I naturally revered high performance - the score on the board. Now, from the vantage point of retirement, I can see that the only way to "win" at sport, in the deepest sense, is also to enjoy it.


I was fascinated while commentating with Sunil Gavaskar last summer to hear the master batsman say he enjoyed the second half of his career far more than the first. This from the man who scored 20 Test hundreds in his first 50 matches! A slight diminution in output was outweighed, from Gavaskar's perspective, by a far more joyful approach to batting.


When Tiger Woods was in his pomp, many of my colleagues used him as a model, perceiving him as the ultimate sportsman. But I was never so sure. Was it really so enviable, Woods' life? To Woods, sport seemed to be about negating his humanity, ironing the play out of his game rather than embracing it. We might admire his iron willpower. But how many people would a Woods-style career really suit? Santi Cazorla, the impish and mischievous Spain and Arsenal midfielder, seems to have more fun in 90 minutes than Woods has in an entire season.


For the apotheosis of unplayful sport, look no further than Lance Armstrong. Forget the cheating and the bullying for a moment. What could be more depressing than tweeting a photo of yourself sitting alone in suburban luxury surrounded by (fraudulent) yellow jerseys? Were there no happy memories, in his mind rather than his camera, to soften the blow of disgrace?


It is also possible for sportsmen, even within the fiercest battles, to cooperate in permitting an air of playfulness.


You see this occasionally in tennis. Most of the time, of course, tactics are explicitly reductionist and self-interested: doing what the opponent least wants. But occasionally a point develops that is different. Both players are constantly trying to win the point, but they also implicitly - and surely subconsciously - enter a different mode. A slice is followed by another slice (apparently inexplicably), a change of pace leads to another change of pace. In short, a conversation develops, something to be enjoyed and extended. And won. For I'm not interested in showmanship here, exhibition-style showing off or playing to the gallery. But there also are moments within proper combat when players are trying to do three things simultaneously - to win, to play (for the fun of it, selfishly) and also to encourage a similar mood on the other side of the net. It must be a rarefied, complete mode of living.


In normal life there is a simpler reason to stay playful. "We don't stop playing because we grow old," George Bernard Shaw remarked, "we grow old because we stop playing."

Alan Bennett: Abolish Private Education

Alan Bennett in The Independent

Preaching is a hazard when writing plays. One isn't supposed to preach and gets told off if one does. Poets are allowed to, but not playwrights, who – if they have naked opinions – do better to clothe them in the decent ambiguities of their characters or conceal them in the sometimes all too thin thicket of the plot. Just don't speak to the audience.

I have always found this prohibition difficult. John Gielgud, who was in my first play, thought talking to the audience was vulgar. Then he was prevailed upon to try it and thereafter would seldom talk to anybody else. I understand this and even in my most naturalistic plays have contrived and relished the moments when a character unexpectedly turns and addresses the house and, in a word, preaches.

This may be because as a boy and a regular worshipper at St Michael's, Headingley, I heard a lot of sermons. I also used to go to Saturday matinees at the Grand Theatre in Leeds, though on occasion the sermons were more dramatic than the plays. This was particularly so when they were preached, as they quite often were, by visiting fathers from the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, who were almost revivalist in their fervour and the spell they cast over the congregation.

So when, as a young man, I first had thoughts about what nowadays is called stand-up, it's not surprising it took the form of a sermon. Like all parodies, it was born out of affection and familiarity and the Anglican services that were in my bones, and there is symmetry here, as the first sermon I preached on a professional stage was in Cambridge 50-odd years ago, across the road at the Arts Theatre in the revue Beyond the Fringe. It was on the text: "My brother Esau is an hairy man but I am a smooth man."

That sermon apart, I have never formally preached since until this morning and here I am again in Cambridge.

This is where I came in.

I had first seen Cambridge 10 years before when, as a boy of 17, I had come down from Leeds in December 1951 to sit the scholarship examination in History, staying the weekend, as one did in those days, in the college of my first choice, Sidney Sussex.

The place and the university bowled me over. Leeds, where I had been born and brought up, was like the other great Northern cities still intact in 1951, but though I was not blind to its architectural splendours – unfashionable though at that time they were – it was a soot-blackened, wholly 19th-century city and as a boy, like Hector in The History Boys, I was famished for antiquity.

I had never been in a place of such continuous and unfolding beauty as Cambridge and, December 1951 being exceptionally cold, the Cam was frozen over and a thick hoarfrost covered every court and quadrangle, giving the whole city an unreal and celestial beauty. And it was empty, as provincial places in those days were.

I see my 17-year-old self roaming unrestricted through the colleges, as one could in those unfranchised days, standing in Trinity Great Court in the moonlight, thinking it inconceivable I could ever come to study in such blessed surroundings. And nor could I, so far as Trinity was concerned.

Sidney Sussex wasn't quite my taste in buildings, but you had to be cleverer than I was – or higher up the social scale – to have the real pick of the architecture.

Still, we were examined in the Senate House, the interior of which, had it been in Leeds, would have been sequestered behind red ropes, and I went to evensong in King's, astonished that one could just walk in and be seated in the choir stalls.

It was Advent, or what nowadays is called the countdown to Christmas, and one of the hymns was "O Come, O Come Emmanuel", which is rather dirge-like, but it has stayed with me all my life since.

Interviewed by the kindly dons at Sidney, I was for the first time conscious of having a Northern accent.

If the dons were genial, some of my fellow candidates were less so. That weekend was the first time I had come across public schoolboys in the mass and I was appalled. They were loud, self-confident and all seemed to know one another, shouting down the table to prove it while also being shockingly greedy. Public school they might be, but they were louts.

Seated at long refectory tables beneath the mellow portraits of Tudor and Stewart grandees, neat, timorous and genteel, we grammar school boys were the interlopers; these slobs, as they seemed to me, the party in possession.

But it was a party, seemingly, that I was going to be allowed to join as, though I was a long way from getting a scholarship, Sidney Sussex offered me a place to read History, to come up after my national service.

This, too, takes in Cambridge and if you're beginning to wonder whether, far from being a sermon, this is just a stroll down memory lane, take heart, because here is where a tentative homily begins to shove its nose above the horizon.

Having done basic training in the infantry, I was then sent on a course to learn Russian, a year of which was spent out of uniform and in very relaxed circumstances in Cambridge.

It was a heady atmosphere, more so in some ways than university proper, where many of my colleagues were headed after national service. Some of them were disconcertingly clever; boys from public schools who, when they talked of their schooldays, often had in the background a master whose teaching had been memorable and about whom they told anecdotes and whose sayings they remembered; teachers, I remember thinking bitterly, who had presumably played a part in getting them the scholarships most of them had at Oxford and Cambridge.

For them, the scholarship examination – from which I'd just managed to scrape a place – had almost been a formality. They had been schooled for it and groomed for the interviews that followed, with the scholarships and exhibitions that ensued almost to be taken for granted. This was Oxford and Cambridge after all; they were entitled. If I felt this was wrong, which I did, it was not at that time an altruistic feeling. I was thinking of myself and how the odds were stacked against me and boys like me. And here I should apologise that this narrative is couched so continuously in single-sex terms, but then, so had my education been, my school, the army, my eventual college – all of them at that time male institutions.

As I say, I saw the odds as stacked against me but took some comfort, as I think educators did generally, in assuming that this situation must inevitably alter and that the proportion of undergraduates from state schools at Oxford and Cambridge would gradually overtake that from public schools until they were both properly and proportionately represented.

It was only when, as time passed this didn't happen, that what in my case had begun as a selfish and even plaintive grievance, hardened to take in not just entrance to Oxford and Cambridge, but access to higher education in general, with the scramble for university places more desperate year by year. And this is to say nothing of the cost. Better minds than mine have tackled this problem and continue to do so and I would be foolish if I claimed to have a solution. But I know what is part of the problem and that is private education. My objection to private education is simply put. It is not fair. And to say that nothing is fair is not an answer. Governments, even this one, exist to make the nation's circumstances more fair, but no government, whatever its complexion, has dared to tackle private education. It might have been feasible at the time of the Butler reforms in 1944 but there were other things going on.

The Labour government in 1945 could have tried, but it had a great deal to do besides. There was not another chance until 1997, when Labour's huge majority would have at least allowed a start, except that the prime minister had been a public schoolboy himself and seemingly a happy one, so that opportunity too went begging. I am not altogether sure why. When the question comes up there is always talk of the social disruption that would result, as if it might be the Dissolution of the Monasteries all over again. But would it?

I am not, after all, suggesting that public schools should be abolished, but a gradual reform which began with the amalgamation of state and public schools at sixth form level, say, ought to be feasible and hardly revolutionary, if the will is there.

And that, of course, is the problem.

Some of this lack of will can be put down to the unfocused parental anxiety summed up, almost comically now, in Stephen Spender's 1930s poem:

My parents kept me from children who were rough,

And who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes.

Class, in a word, still. Less forgivably, there is a reluctance to share more widely (and thus to dilute) the undoubted advantages of a private education: smaller classes, better facilities and still, seemingly, a greater chance of getting to university. Beyond that, though, I'm less sure of the long-term social advantages which once would have included the accent, but hardly today. Still – and this is not to discount the many excellent schools in the state sector – a child of average ability is likely to do better at a good public school. Otherwise why would they be sent there?

 

Were reforms to happen, I suspect that the ones who would be the least worried by such an amalgamation would be the boys and girls themselves.

It would be unsurprising if you were to discount these forthright opinions as the rantings of an old man. I am now 80, an age that entitles one to be listened to, though not necessarily heeded. I had never been much concerned with politics until the 1980s, when they became difficult to avoid.

Without ever having been particularly left-wing, I am happy never to have trod that dreary safari from left to right which generally comes with age, a trip writers in particular seem drawn to: Amis, Osborne, Larkin, Iris Murdoch all ending up at the spectrum's crusty and clichéd end. If I haven't, it's partly due to circumstances: there has been so little that has happened to England since the 1980s that I have been happy about or felt able to endorse. One has only had to stand still to become a radical. Though that, too, sounds like an old man talking.

Still, I don't regret it and one thing it's always a pleasure to see on television is the occasional programme about ancient and persistent activists; old ladies recounting their early struggles for women's rights or battles for birth control, veteran campers from Greenham Common: cheerful, good-humoured and radical as they ever were; still – though it's not a word I care for – feisty after all these years. That to me is wisdom as disillusion is not.

Another reason why there is a lack of will and a reluctance to meddle – a reluctance, one has to say, that does not protect the state sector where scarcely a week passes without some new initiative being announced – is that private education is seemingly not to be touched. This I think is because the division between state and private education is now taken for granted.Which doesn't mean that it is thought to be fair, only that there is nothing that can or should be done about it.

But if, unlike the Daily Mail, one believes that the nation is still generous, magnanimous and above all fair, it is hard not to think that we all know that to educate not according to ability but according to the social situation of the parents is both wrong and a waste.

Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should. And if their education ends without it dawning on them then that education has been wasted. I would also suggest – hesitantly, as I am not adept enough to follow the ethical arguments involved – that if it is not fair, then maybe it's not Christian either.

How much our ideas of fairness owe to Christianity, I am not sure. Souls, after all, are equal in the sight of God and thus deserving of what these days is called a level playing field.

This is certainly not the case in education and never has been, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't go on trying. Isn't it time we made a proper start? Unlike today's ideologues, whom I would call single-minded if mind came into it at all, I have no fear of the state. I was educated at the expense of the state, both at school and university. My father's life was saved by the state as, on one occasion, was my own. This would be the nanny state, a sneering appellation that gets short shrift with me. Without the state, I would not be standing here today.

I have no time for the ideology masquerading as pragmatism that would strip the state of its benevolent functions and make them occasions for profit. And why roll back the state only to be rolled over by the corporate entities that have been allowed, nay encouraged, to take its place? I am uneasy when prisons are run for profit or health services either. The rewards of probation and the alleviation of suffering are human profits and nothing to do with balance sheets. And these days no institution is immune. In my last play, the Church of England is planning to sell off Winchester Cathedral.

"Why not?" says a character. "The school is private, why shouldn't the cathedral be also?" And it's a joke, but it's no longer far-fetched.

With ideology masquerading as pragmatism, profit is now the sole yardstick against which all our institutions must be measured, a policy that comes not from experience but from assumptions – false assumptions – about human nature, with greed and self-interest taken to be its only reliable attributes.

In pursuit of profit, the state and all that goes with it is sold from under us who are its rightful owners and with a frenzy and dedication that call up memories of an earlier iconoclasm.

Which brings me nearly to the end.

One pastime I had as a boy which, thanks to my partner, I resumed in middle age, was looking at old churches, "ruin-bibbing" Larkin dismissively called it, though we perhaps have a little more expertise than Larkin disingenuously claimed he had. I do know what rood lofts were, for instance, though, like Larkin, I'm not always able to date a roof.

The charm of most medieval churches consists in what history has left and one learns to delight in little, the dregs of history: a few 15th-century bench ends, an alabaster tomb chest or, where glass is concerned, just the leavings of bigotry, with ideology weakening when it came to out-of-reach tracery – the hammer too heavy, the ladder too short – so that only fragments survive, a cluster of crockets and towers maybe, the glimpse of a golden city with a devil leering down.

In my bleaker moments, these shards of history seem to me emblematic obviously of what has happened to England in the past, but also a reminder and a warning of what in other respects is continuing to happen in the present, with the fabric of the state and the welfare state in particular stealthily dismantled as once the fabric of churches more rudely was, sold off, farmed out; another Dissolution, with profit taking precedence over any other consideration, and the perpetrators today as locked into their ideology and convinced of their own rightness as any of the devout louts who four and five hundred years ago stove in the windows and scratched out the faces of the saints as a passport to Heaven.

I end with the last few lines of my first play, Forty Years On. It's set in a school with the headmaster on the verge of retirement and is what nowadays is called a play for England. It ends with the boys and staff singing the doxology "All Creatures That on Earth Do Dwell", with before it, this advertisement for England:

To let. A valuable site at the crossroads of the world. At present on offer to corporate clients. Outlying portions of the estate already disposed of to sitting tenants. Of some historical and period interest. Some alterations and improvements necessary.

42 phrases a lexophile would love

By Ajay Desouza

1. I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

2. Police were called to a day care, where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

3. Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He’s all right now.

4. The roundest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference.

5. To write with a broken pencil is pointless.

6. When fish are in schools they sometimes take debate.

7. The short fortune teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

8. A thief who stole a calendar… got twelve months.

9. A thief fell and broke his leg in wet cement. He became a hardened criminal.

10. Thieves who steal corn from a garden could be charged with stalking.

11. When the smog lifts in Los Angeles , U. C. L. A.

12. The math professor went crazy with the blackboard. He did a number on it.

13. The professor discovered that his theory of earthquakes was on shaky ground.

14. The dead batteries were given out free of charge.

15. If you take a laptop computer for a run you could jog your memory.

16. A dentist and a manicurist fought tooth and nail.

17. A bicycle can’t stand alone; it is two tired.

18. A will is a dead giveaway.

19. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

20. A backward poet writes inverse.

21. In a democracy it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism, it’s your Count that votes.

22. A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.

23. If you don’t pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.

24. With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.

25. Show me a piano falling down a mine shaft and I’ll show you A-flat miner.

26. When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.

27. The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully recovered.

28. A grenade fell onto a kitchen floor in France and resulted in Linoleum Blownapart.

29. You are stuck with your debt if you can’t budge it.

30. Local Area Network in Australia : The LAN down under.

31. He broke into song because he couldn’t find the key.

32. A calendar’s days are numbered.

33. A boiled egg is hard to beat.

34. He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

35. A plateau is a high form of flattery.

36. Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

37. When you’ve seen one shopping center you’ve seen a mall.

38. If you jump off a Paris bridge, you are in Seine.

39. Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.

40. Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.

41. Acupuncture: a jab well done.

42. A lot of money is tainted: ‘Taint yours, and ‘taint mine.

India on stage and in-yer-face

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

In 2007, I went to the Royal Court to see Free Outgoing, a play by Anupama Chandrasekhar, from Chennai. It was directed by the then rising star, Indhu Rubasingham, who has recently replaced Nicolas Kent as artistic director of London's Tricycle theatre.

The central role of a distraught mother was played flawlessly by Lolita Chakrabarti, whose own first play, Red Velvet, is getting rave reviews at the Tricycle. Chandrasekhar sparkled in the constellation of Royal Court emerging playwrights and hers was the first contemporary Indian drama to be staged at a non-fringe venue in Britain. Five years earlier, she had been on the Court's International Residency programme and there she learnt to hone her work, raise her game. And how.

The play's subject was taboo – sex between unmarried, Indian teenagers and the revenge of society, its hypocrisies and repressive customs that push against modernity even in hubs of new technology. Deepa, a "good" girl and bright pupil, has sex with a schoolboy. He records the juicy moments on his mobile and the clips circulate. She, her widowed mum and brother are horribly ostracised. The audience, mostly white that day, seemed discombobulated, I thought. A comprehensive school teacher asked me if the sex was "realistic or believable". She sounded almost as disapproving as the cruel keepers of virtue on stage and miffed that India was not conserving its old self for the Occident to romanticise and to vacation in. In contrast, I and my Asian friends felt the opposite: Indian drama was finally getting away from Bollywood clichés and religious masques, speaking truths, repudiating conformity. Chandrasekhar's works are not generally staged in India, though some do sneak into small, rebellious venues. Other young talent is similarly thwarted by censoriousness, the lack of resources and spaces for inventive and daring work.

This week at the Royal Court five more such writers will have their plays performed as rehearsed readings. I saw them all as full productions in Mumbai in January at the Writers' Bloc Festival of new writing from all over the country. Some were edgy and tragic, others sharp and funny, all profoundly affecting. 

Artistically brilliant, urgent, energetic, authentic and eloquent, they touched nerves in the body of their nation, made it twitch. They were among the most powerful examples of modern theatre I have ever seen.

The Royal Court collaborated with Rage, a Mumbai theatre company, to create this festival. Rage was set up in 1993, by Shernaz Patel, Rajit Kapur who are both esteemed actors, and writer Rahul da Cunha. The multitalented ensemble commissions, directs, produces and constantly stretches the parameters of the possible.

Da Cunha explained why and how it all started. Being in Mumbai, a city that "progresses and regresses at the same time" and in a nation "going forwards and backwards and still holding together and to its democracy" is what kicked the Rage trio into action:

"We were driven, restless, felt it was time for modern India to find its voice, its own stories and put them on stage. We didn't have our own English-language theatre except, of course, for Shakespeare, Pinter, Osborne and so on. We started Indianizing the great Western plays, but what we really wanted, and young urban audiences were hungry for, were Indian dramas in English. In a crazy, haphazard way we thought, we knew, the time had come for that to happen. Some people thought drama in English would be elitist. We didn't – what we wrote and directed would have to be in the English Indians actually speak, their intonation, expressions and articulations."

Just as their ideas were shaping up, the Royal Court's artistic director Dominic Cooke and associate director Elyse Dodgson, turned up in Mumbai for a night after conducting a workshop in Bangalore. Call it karma. Da Cuhna, grabbed them, introduced himself and Rage and using his immense persuasive powers got them to promise workshops in Mumbai. They did, and a partnership was forged, with valued help from the British Council. Dodgson, other Royal court nurturers and Phyllida Lloyd went over and released more pent-up creativity than they could ever have imagined. The incipient dramatists were given tools, taught essential skills. At the first Writers' Bloc festival in 2004, in Da Cunha's view, "The level was pretty stunning. Young people saw the results and were totally engaged." Chandrasekhar's disturbing festival play about an Indian talk-show hostess who has acid thrown at her proved that she was both brave and singularly gifted.

Rage's founders carried on making their own remarkable work too. One gripping play I saw in 2010 was Pune Highway, written by Da Cunha and with Kapur in the lead. It was a pacy buddy thriller exposing India's furious and thoughtless globalisation and its ethically vacant middle class, again cutting edge and unsettling for Indians who prefer PR or patriotic art.

India's theatre tradition began in classical times when religious stories were enacted in Sanskrit or as mimes in villages and communities. Gods, improbable heroes and myths were loved by high and low and kept them god-fearing. They are still performed during festivals and at auspicious times. A parallel tradition was drama in local and regional Indian languages. The works, whether classic, extraordinary, worthy or barren, were and still are loved by millions. Parsi theatre was another popular strand. Parsis are descended from original Zoroastrians who fled Persia when Muslims took over that land. They settled in India and under the Raj, this small, urban and successful community became famous for its well-produced and popular comedies and farces in Gujarati.

From the 19th century onwards, playwrights wrote questioning and more complex works – the greatest of them Bengal's polymath Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. By that time, Shakespeare and other European masters were being read and performed by Westernised urban Indians. After independence, those cultural bonds remained intact. Felicity Kendal's family were nomadic players who took the Bard to rural areas; the Sixties film Shakespeare Wallah told the story.

Since then prestigious drama and music schools have been established and become centres of excellence. I have seen some of their fine productions too, though these seemed to me to keep assiduously within the boundaries of "acceptable" art – unlike the breakout works produced at the Writers' Bloc festival.

In the week I spent at the festival, I saw how Dodgson and her team and the transformative Rage company interacted with writers and directors, never letting standards slip, never slipping into patronising allowances. Their intensity, honesty and sense of purpose stimulated astonishing creative heat and resolve in the artistes and writers. Dodgson is a force of nature and was described to me as the "godmother" of the creative cohort. One of the youthful actors said to be it was "like being in the fastest car, feeling the breeze and excitement, but never losing control because you are trying to reach somewhere where nobody has gone before. It's about control and real freedom, giving expression to things kept locked up. Escape from the usual. You don't know how the young of India need that."

The five readings selected for London include Mahua by Akash Mohimen, which was originally written in Hindi and has been translated. Incredibly young and gifted, he chose as his theme extreme rural poverty and addiction to hooch. It made audiences weep silently. Ok Tata Bye Bye by Purva Naresh, also a translation from Hindi, is about feisty, smart sex workers selling their bodies to truck drivers. The other three deal with property developers and broken communities, the conflict in Kashmir and ruthless modernisation. None of these plays is maudlin or sanctimonious. They are real and engaging, reveal aspects of a country still barely known by Brits. And best of all, not one of them features a noisy wedding or call-centre story.