Art academy to hold fest, artistes call it face-saving exercise

QUOTE: “We called up a meeting of all drama groups and fixed the date of submitting the scripts by February 15. The rehearsals will be reviewed by March 15 and the drama festival will be held in the last week of March,” Sudhir Mahajan, senior drama instructor, JKAACL

QUOTE: “The drama competition is a long process which starts in September and concludes in December, but after going through the news item, the academy authorities have started a face-saving exercise,” Sapna Soni, senior theatre artiste

Tribune Impact

Vikram Sharma

Tribune News Service

Jammu, February 13

The Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages has finally woken up from slumber and has announced that it would hold the annual drama festival. Artistes have, however, said the timing was not ideal to hold the event and have called it a face-saving exercise.

In its February 6 edition, The Tribune had published a story about the failure of the academy to hold its annual events, including the yearly drama festival.

While talking to The Tribune earlier, the Secretary, Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages, Munir-ul-Islam, had said the activity log of six months was with his private secretary Zahoor Ahmed Shah. Shah, however, had passed the buck on the assistant cultural officer.

In the absence of any drama, dance, music and literature events since the abrogation of Article 370 on August 5 last year, artistes have been at the receiving end.

However, after the report was published about the academy’s failure to hold events, the authorities, in a hurry to wrap up some of the important functions before the end of the financial year, have announced that it will hold the annual drama festival.

“We called up a meeting of all drama groups and fixed the date of submitting the scripts by February 15. The rehearsals will be reviewed by March 15 and the drama festival will be held in the last week of March,” said Sudhir Mahajan, senior drama instructor, JKAACL.

Though the participating groups and artistes have got a sigh of relief as the drama event is finally being held, they said it was a perfect case of ‘hurry makes bad curry’.

“The drama competition is a long process which starts in September and concludes in December, but after going through the news item, the academy authorities have started a face-saving exercise,” said Sapna Soni, senior theatre artiste.

Another stage artiste Bindia said a majority of the theatre artistes were school and college students who would not be able to participate in the event as they would be preparing for the exams.

“Though the academy has announced that it will hold the event, the timing is not ideal which and is likely going to affect the event adversely. There is an urgent need to make drastic changes in the official set-up of the academy so that the calendar activities are taken up at the right time,” said Bindia.