Actors and action

5 December 1964, Zilla Parishad Hall, Kurnool

Professor Kasturi's English.

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RARELY do I preside over a dramatic performance; I have come here tonight, because you are having a play on "" and on a great devotee drawn by the deity to that temple and also because the author is a devotee for years. What exactly is a drama? It is a dream within a dream. It is a dream which unfolds before you, even while you are "awake," another dream. It tries to shed some light, some joy, some courage, some faith, some hope, some meaning on the dream called life. Naturally, man has to seek all means of discovering the meaning of life. For, without knowing it, he is lost; he wanders from birth to birth, receiving knock after knock, and is seldom the better for all the experience. He must first know that he is deluded into taking the body, the objects and the sense-experienced world, as real. Then, he must seek to know the real basis, which is mistaken to be something else. That delusion is deep-rooted; it has warped the outlook and put man on the wrong track. The drama must be aimed at showing man that he is deluded by a false sense of values; that he is running after vanities, leaving reality behind. It should instill into man faith, strong enough to make him recoil from that pursuit, and gain the glory of discovering his great illusion. The sorrows of life can be ended not through hatred and injustice; these only breed more of the species. They will yield only to nobler and higher thoughts and experiences, germinating from the pure heart where the Lord resides. This drama, on , deals with such experiences arising from the heart of a sincere devotee and that is the reason, as I already said, why I agreed to preside over this second anniversary of the and why I stayed on until the entire play was enacted.

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Develop the of self-effacement All this is very good. But, is it too much to ask that you show in your own lives, outside the stage, that the godly path is the best and the safest and perhaps even the smoothest? Take this role of the actor as a good guide for your own betterment. It is a which will give you peace. actually lived the roles of Puranic characters like and and realised and through identification with the experiences of each.

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Become one with the holy characters you represent; derive inspiration and joy therefrom, your acting too will thereby improve vastly; you will earn the gratitude of thousands. Feminine characteristics appeared in 's physical body when he intensely believed himself to be yearning for a vision of ; when he identified himself with and spent months on trees, uttering only , his anatomy changed; he grew an incipient tail. That was the measure of the depth of his (thought power), of the self-effacement. Use the dramatic art and the chances it gives you to develop the of self-effacement, for that is the quickest means of realisation of the real Self.

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Make the theatre holy and sanctifying I must mention another point also. The author of this play is also here and you have this day honoured him for services to your and to the cause of "drama". Whenever you write a play, transform all that is low and worldly into the high and the other-worldly. Do not treat the low things as low; treat them as lapses, as mistakes, failures, incomplete attempts, errors to be avoided. Increase the (non-worldly) aspect of all relations between person and person. Human beings are not mere bodies, appetites, hungers and thirst, passions and prejudices. These are impediments, lapses.

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