...like show business

If you love going to the theatre, Delhi is not really the best place to live.

There are shows off and on of course, at the National School of Drama or the few private theatres that dot the city, but there isn't what you'd call a formal theatre circuit.

Most papers do not have a theatre column (this paper excepted of course), and the shows that do take place are mostly performed by amateur theatre groups and actors.

Professor Mohan Maharishi has been tracking this trend with dismay for years. An NSD-trained actor himself, and a professor at Punjab University, Professor Maharishi often wondered what on earth became of all the students that passed through his drama courses, and institutes like his all over the country. "The problem haunted me!" he says.

"What do they do afterwards? Where do they work? The fact that no one knows, and the fact also that this question is very rarely asked, has various implications for theatre in this country. Actors have to take up supplemental jobs to make a living; most end up living in Mumbai and go into films (a minuscule percent make it big, like Irfaan or Naseeruddin Shah). For 50 years, there have been 40 institutes running in the country, churning out actors. Where are they?"

Without a structured environment to absorb these actors, there is very little they can do but disappear into oblivion (maybe reappearing several years later as a successful business executive, in a field several light years away from the one they started out in).

"Of course, the solution was to have some professional groups in the city, which would provide steady work and a stipend to these actors," says Professor Maharishi. "But no one's really interested in starting one."

This changed though, when the professor met Sanjiv Chopra. Chopra, formerly a senior executive at Ranbaxy who has had around 20 years of corporate experience, in India and abroad, in Moscow, Thailand and China, had come to watch a production of Einstein, a play written and directed by Professor Maharishi. "It was an excellent production," he says, "And I had to meet the man behind it."

The meeting between Chopra and Maharishi may have been divinely arranged, for they both had had exactly the same thoughts on the fate of theatre, and the same plans for what they could do about it "" it just needed their meeting to put these plans in motion.

"I've been an amateur actor ever since I was a student at IIT. I was part of an amateur group, DramaTech, which performed from 1984 until the early 1990s. I knew that I was disatisfied with the state of the theatre in Delhi, but there wasn't much that I could do about it (apart from putting on amateur plays), since I was working full-time," explains Chopra "But I had made a pact with myself that I would quit my corporate job if I either made enough money, had climbed far enough up the executive ladder, or reached the age of 50."

Luckily for Chopra, he felt that he had achieved both the first two aims before the third one came to pass, and in 2003, he quit his lucrative job. "It was a difficult decision, but I chucked it completely. Finally, I had enough time to devote to theatre."

From the moment they met, five months ago, Maharishi and Chopra found that their ideas clicked. Maharishi provided the creative impetus for a professional theatre group, and Chopra provided what we so often forget is needed, even (or perhaps especially) the arts: the finances.

It was Chopra's idea to "make an organisation that behaves like an organisation" "" in fact, one that has funds for shows, for the sets and costumes, can pay its actors and afford to concentrate only on theatre. "Creative people are not necessarily business people," says Chopra, "but where the two qualities meet, you get outstanding productions "" look at someone like Prasoon Joshi or Ram Gopal Verma."

The third part of the picture is Shreevardhan Trivedi, the face of the crime show Sansani on Star News. "Shreevardhan jumped at the opportunity," says Maharishi, "he feels really passionately about theatre, and he is also dismayed at the reduction in production values of theatre across the country "" even at the NSD."

Together, these three men brainstormed the idea of NATWA (National Theatre Workers Alliance): A Delhi Theatre Company. The group has already put on its first performance, in Delhi's Sri Ram Centre, of Shakespeare's Othello, translated into Hindi by Professor Maharishi.

The play has been well-received (it starts veteran actor Mahendra Mewati as the brooding Othello), has run for two nights and will play again for three days this weekend, and may move to Mumbai.

As of now, of course, the group is still functioning, for all intents and purposes, as an amateur group. Its only members are its six founding members (Dr Anjala Maharishi and Renu Chopra are also members, as are theatre personality Harvinder Kaur, and Parag Agarwal and Dr Meenakshi Bharat, who have no professional ties to the theatre).

"The 20 members of the cast and crew will automatically become members," says Chopra, "But we're still young and it will probably take time for more members to join. However, we do have two more productions lined up for February and April, and hopefully this will help to drum up more interest."

Find out more about the group at www.natwatheatre.com.