'I am touring literature festivals as I have a book to sell'

HYDERABAD: An uninhibited tête-à-tête, peppered with wit, sarcasm and an enlightening insight into the world of performing arts, is what celebrated playwright Mahesh Dattani 'gifted' his audience in the city on Day 1 of the Hyderabad Literary Festival.
In conversation with Tutun Mukherjee at Ashiana, Dattani traced for his listeners his journey through the past few decades as he went from being a teenager, passionately in love with dance, to a stage actor who soon graduated to direction and eventually carved a niche for himself as a playwright."I am not as wedded to the written word as I am to the spoken word," Dattani said, explaining why he chose the stage over writing a novel.
Interlinking dance and theatre, he suggested that actors should learn to dance as "theatre requires actors to express through the body, just like dancers." Apart from penning the famous play Dance Like A Man, which demystifies myths about the conventional roles thrust upon a man and a woman, Dattani's association with this medium is also through his professional training in ballet and bharatanatyam.
So how did the transition into movies come about? "One very important reason why I started doing movies is money," candidly said the Morning Raga director, who made his debut on the big screen with Mango Souffle, adapted from his popular play On a Muggy Night in Mumbai on homosexuals, and made on "less than a shoestring budget".
The playwright was equally unapologetic about admitting that he was touring literary festivals because he had "a book to sell". Me and My Plays, Dattani's latest work that comprises a memoire, was released at HLF on Friday.
The day also saw former diplomat and author of many books, Amit Dasgupta, dwell upon the subject 'Why We Write' and share insights from his latest work, Lessons from Ruslana: In Search of Alternative Thinking, inspired by the life of Ruslana Korshunova, a sensationally successful Russian model who jumped to her death at the young age of 20. "It is basically an exploration of who we are. To summarize in six words, it is about why we do what we do," Dasgupta said, admitting that he wrote because "he loved to write". He also dwelled upon the challenges facing the publishing world these days with the advent of e-books.