In 1960, a 22-year-old on his way to England on a Rhodes scholarship on the University of Oxford, wrote a play that harnessed the definition of desire to a whole nother level. Performed across the country and translated into multiple languages, late playwright Girish Kanad's Yayati is a retelling of an epic where a king cursed to old age for sexual misdemeanor takes the youth of his own son. This evening, the play comes to life as theatre artistes including Lovleen Mishra, Sunil Shanbag, Sapan Saran, and Rajit Kapur take the stage for dramatised readings of Yayati as well as Karnad's last play Crossing to Talikota, written in 2018 as he struggled with his health. Thus, the event has been aptly named BookEnds - signifying the vast body of work in between these two texts.

Sunil Shanbhag