Q. How did the idea of the book come about?
A. It was long overdue. People would tell me to publish a book with my scripts. We started doing that with our festival. Then people told us to at least give us snapshots or glimpses of our journey. At the festival, we had plastered Prithvi with photos and long banners of Ansh over the years including our plays from 1993-94 to 2015. That's when I felt it should become a book. We had 40 plays with different themes. People don't remember some of the older plays so we thought of compiling the synopsis and cast of each play. We were excited to source the photographs. We wanted to include our technicians and other support, including music directors like Vishal Bharadwaj, Shailendra as well as classical music artistes. We have included actors, set directors from then until this generation. You can find all of this on Google but we have given it an imagery of the kind of work we've done over the years.

Makarand Deshpande at Prithvi Theatre. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi

Q. What was Ansh's first play?
A. Intially, we didn't have a group name. I would perform in inter-collegiate events from NM (College), for practically every competition. I did plays in Hindi, Marathi, English and Gujarati. This landed me roles in TV series and films. I wanted to perform at Prithvi so I performed with the group I used to act with earlier. I remember doing Madhyam in 1992-93. Officially, we did Jungle ke Bahar with Kay Kay (Menon), Sanjna (Kapoor) and then I did the Sadhu Vasvani biopic. Then we had to name the group for technical reasons. I call Dream Man my first play. At that point, we all had dreams. Mumbai was called the city of dreams. Actors came from everywhere, and Prithvi was the centre for trained and untrained actors. There would be a show every Saturday and Sunday.