Making strings talk

Amarjot Kaur

With magic in his hands and skill at the tip of his fingers, ventriloquist, puppeteer and puppet-maker Ramdas Padhye beguiles the strings of your heart just as he makes the puppets dance attendance to his wits. On his visit to Chandigarh, where he performed at the Chitkara International School, along with his wife, Aparna Ramdas, he elaborates on ventriloquism in India and compares it to the world puppet theatre.

Over the last 40 years, he has performed more than 9,000 ventriloquism and puppet shows in India as well as abroad. He has been regularly featuring on India's national channel Doordarshan since 1972. He was the first Indian ventriloquist to perform on NBC, ABC and CBS television in America, and BBC’s Channel Four. “As a mechanical engineer, I had quit my safe job to take up ventriloquism, a form of art that is much appreciated globally as compared to India,” he says sharing his experience at CBS Television. “It was in 1971 that I went to the US and had put up an act on the Hippie culture, drugs and yogis, which was a huge success there. However, it was only after my ‘foreign return trip’ that India gave me my big break on Doordarshan in 1972,” he says.

Having done television shows like Aap Hi Sochiye and Meri Bhi Suno, Ramdas also featured his puppet acts in films like Mahaan and Dil Hai Tumhaara. “I had performed at the Filmfare Award Night in 1981, where Mr Bachchan saw my performance. I have this habit of staying aloof after my performance. Keeping up with the ritual, I went to the green room when someone called saying that Mr Bachchan wanted to see me,” he says.

“I went to Mr Bachchan and he asked me to see him at some studio, the note of which he handed over to me (I still have that hand-written note by Mr Bachchan). The following day when I went to see him, his assistant made us wait for over two hours. Ultimately, Amit Ji came up to me and asked if I could teach him ventriloquism for his film, Mahaan,” shares Ramdas, while adding that he acted off-screen to help Amitabh Bachchan play the role of Guru, who was a puppeteer and comedian in the film. Also, for those of you who remember the Lijjat Papad commercial featuring a puppet Bunny, well, that Hae! hae! hae! was Ramdas’ voice and the Bunny too, is his puppet!

He has designed puppets for various companies like Kelloggs, Siemens, Walt Disney India Pvt Ltd, Wizcraft et al, as also various international celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Frank Sinatra, Shah Rukh Khan and Sanjay Dutt. He has worked with ace actors of Bollywood like Amitabh Bacchan and Aamir Khan in films, advertisements and TV shows. As for his favourite performance, he shares, “In China, they host a Unima International Puppetry Festival, where we performed, despite the language barrier. We loved performing there and the show was organised by the government, while in India we have such skilled puppeteers who are battling adversity because our country’s government fails to help them.”

Meanwhile, Satyajit (third-generation ventriloquist, puppeteer and finalist of India’s Got Talent), who has also performed at KBC and his wife Rajuta accompanied Aparna and Ramdas.

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