A play everyone is excited about at the Nehru Theatre Festival is Dayashankar Ki Diary. Written and directed by Nadira Zaheer Babbar, it is the latest offering from the Ekjute Theatre stable. The play is a Hindi mono-act by Ashish Vidyarthi and revolves around Dayashankar's life where fantasies and realities merge to the point of becoming inseparable. Sigmund Freud has pointed out that a man lives as much inside his mind as outside. But what happens to a man who cannot distinguish between the two?

Dayashankar Ki Diary is in the form of a dramatised memoir of an unsuccessful man. A typical small towner who comes to the city with dreams of getting into films. Instead he lands up a clerical job and is unable to reconcile with drab realities. As Bertolt Brecht has said, "Giving somebody a job for a small salary is same as condemning him to life imprisonment." Dayashankar is overwhelmed with a sense of rejection and humiliation. In his small dirty room which he shares with another man, he spins a fine cocoon of fantasies and ultimately loses control. Is Dayashankar really mad? Do we also not live in our own fantasies to protect ourselves from our failures. The play is worth watching for the intriguing questions it throws up.

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