Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot picked up momentum only after its 1957 performance in front of prison inmates. Saint Quentin prisoners appreciated the absurdist play much more than the theatre-going audience, which was unamused by a plot centred around two characters who wait for the third one. The legend is often recalled in theatre history. Little remembered, however, is a Marathi group's rendering of the same play in Mumbai's oldest prison, Arthur Road Jail, in 2010. Not only did the prisoners enjoy the show, in which late Tom Alter presented Pozzo's dilemma in fluent Marathi, but they also had a tête-à-tête with the performers. One of the prison mates, who happened to be a student of the National School of Drama, said Godot's upside down universe felt so close to reality. "I think the abstract cosmos of the play connects with the prisoners' isolated state," says the play's producer Anant Panshikar. He feels the script works in the current lockdown times too; in fact, he is now in search of a cast, which can project Beckett's vision on a digital platform. "I also wait for a defined audience, which most theatre people do," Panshikar says half-jokingly.

In the pandemic times, when the world awaits normalcy, Waiting for Godot, resonates in a funny way because waiting has become as integral as sleeping or dining. Each wait is individual, different in way, shape and form. Some wait for the COVID-19 vaccine, some wait for an ambulance to ferry their dear ones, some long for pathology test results, some pine for the resounding aarti of Lord Ganesh, while others yearn for schools to begin. At the root of the waiting, there is faith that we will be able to resuscitate the identifiable systems/practices, which we call life.