Four decades ago, when Meena Naik, an acclaimed children’s theatre director and actor from Mumbai, wanted to learn puppetry, she had to learn by trial and error, painting faces on empty plastic bottles and rag pieces and bringing them to life with voice modulation and staging techniques. “Anyone can become a puppeteer. You needn’t have a good hand in art and craft. You just need to be creative,” believes Naik, who now pulls the strings at Mumbai University’s very own Puppetry Department, where she started a first-of-its-kind certified course in puppetry in 2013.

Meena Naik at work