Metro

At the Summer Theatre Festival at National School of Drama every year, they perform a hilarious play about a young man trying to climb the corporate culture. Shortcut, as it is called, is based on the Broadway adaptation of The Apartment, and though the basic plot is the same in all of them, the treatment in the Hindi play has to be seen to be believed. By serious theater standards, they take the production values and overall thematic presentation to ludicrous, festive levels that only a play in India can.

Anurag Basu’s multiple strands in one tale, Life in a Metro, reminded m....