Jammu, Jan 19: Natrang presented ‘Sarkari Afsar’, a play in Hindi in its weekly theatre series on Sunday at its Studio Theatre in Jammu.
The play has been written by Laxmikant Vaishnav and was directed by Neeraj Kant. The play portrayed a real-life situation of a ‘Sarkari Daftar’ (Government Office) and highlighted the vices in a very intelligent manner.
The play opens in a government office where all the employees are shown to working in their own styles. As they have job security, no one bothers to exercise punctuality; on the contrary, they have their own reasons to modify the rules and regulations as per their personal convenience. The common vices like red-tapeism, nepotism, favouritism, corruption, absenteeism and sycophancy which are generally associated with such offices are prominently shown in the play in a very genuine manner.
The office has a peon who listens to none as no one can remove him from his permanent job and moreover no one, even the boss has courage to say anything to him as he has lot of secrets of theirs and thus exploits them at appropriate times. Everyone in the office has his/her weakness and each one is busy exploiting that just to implement a personal agenda. The only person who musters respect from this stubborn peon is an official who is relative of a minister who works fearlessly as being a relative of a Minister, as no one could harm him in any manner. On the top of it, the Head of the Department, who was supposed to maintain integrity and punctuality of the office himself, shirks from his duties and remains absconding from the office to cater to his personal merry making engagements. But to the dismay of all, a vigilance officer conducts a surprise raid and finds no one in the office without any information and thus orders suspension of all the absconders. But by the time this new situation could establish the faith of good governance, the raid by a vigilance officer turns out to be dream and the fate of working of a government office continues to be the same. Natrang young artists who performed in the play included Mihir Gujral, Aryan Sharma, Kartik Kumar, Adaksh Bagal and Lalita Sharma. Lights were operated by Neeraj Kant whereas the music of the play was scored by Kananpreet Kaur.
