About Me
I am a theatre practitioner and director based in Delhi/Dehradun, India. My work focuses on metatheatre and non-traditional dramaturgy, using unconventional structures to explore questions of identity, authorship, and power. I am interested in collision—bringing together texts, traditions, and theatrical styles that normally wouldn't share a stage. My production CUTआक्ष ran for 22 performances and won First Place for Best Production at IIT Kanpur's Antaragni festival. I also wrote and directed NIRDESHAQ, which combined Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author with Mohan Rakesh's Hindi play Aadhe Adhure, using the structure of one to examine the themes of the other. It ran for 11 performances and was staged at the Amity Theatre Festival and the India Habitat Centre.
I am a former President of The Players, a Delhi-based theatre society founded in 1957. I hold a BA in English Literature from Delhi University, a Certificate in Dramatics from the National School of Drama, and a Master's in Theatre. Across more than 30 productions, I have worked as a director, actor, lighting designer, and technical coordinator. This includes work with Purvabhyas Theatre, the NSD TIE Company, and international festivals like Jashn-e-Bachpan and Bharat Rang Mahotsav 2026. Through these projects and education, I have collaborated with the likes of Adil Hussain, Santanu Bose, Aamir Khan, and Sameep Singh.
In rehearsals, my process changes depending on what the material needs. I might use hot-seating for character development or design specific exercises if a scene feels stuck. I don't try to force a single emotional approach onto actors; instead, I look for the specific cue or image that works for each individual. If a scene requires intensity, I don't just ask for generic anger—I work to find the exact trigger that helps that specific actor deliver it naturally. I prefer to give actors a destination and let them find their own way there, keeping an eye out for accidental moments that we can turn into deliberate choices. Rather than choreographing every move, I focus on creating the right conditions for the performance to happen.
Artistic Statement
I make theatre about the moment a structure stops working—not because I enjoy destruction, but because that is when things get honest. When a script collapses, when a family's story falls apart, or when a theatrical convention breaks down right in front of an audience, that is the moment I want to capture. What survives? Who speaks when the author leaves the room?
Growing up in a theatre family, the stage was always a familiar space. However, the theatre I saw around me in Delhi often followed rigid rules—classical texts, established playwrights, and conventional staging. I found myself wanting to break those rules. I became interested in what happens when you bring together elements that normally wouldn't share a space. For instance, CUTआक्ष stripped away theatrical layers until audiences genuinely couldn't tell what was scripted and what was an accident. In NIRDESHAQ, I had the characters of Mohan Rakesh’s Hindi play Aadhe Adhure hijack Pirandello’s unstable rehearsal room, using the breakdown of one text to expose the hidden politics of the other. In both cases, the structure wasn't just a container for the story; the structure was the story.
I work bilingually, bridging traditions and theatrical styles that were never meant to meet. Comedy is one of the ways I usually get in, as I believe humor is the most honest route into serious questions then there is seriousness. Ultimately, I am not interested in theatre that ends when the curtains close. I want people to leave the room still arguing, still engaged, and still unsettled by something they cannot quite name. That is what I try to create every time.
Vision Statement
The project I cannot stop thinking about is a play with no single version.
The audience enters together. They share a beginning — Room A. Then they split. Some go to Room B1, others to Room B2. Each path takes them through different scenes, different characters, different sides of the same story. The paths keep diverging — C1 and C2, D1 and D2 — until everyone converges in Room E for the ending.
The ending is the same for everyone. But it means something completely different depending on which rooms you walked through.
The story I want to tell this way is about Hindu-Muslim relations in India — a reality in which both sides are absolutely certain they are right, and both sides have evidence. I am not interested in deciding who is correct. I am interested in the fact that we have all been living inside one room our entire lives, convinced we have seen the whole picture. The form makes that argument without a single line of dialogue having to say it.
You leave the theatre incomplete. You talk to someone who took the other path. You begin to understand what you missed. Maybe you come back.
This project needs a writer, a larger ensemble, and a production scale I am currently building toward. It is one of the main reasons I am seeking graduate training — not to be told what theatre is, but to develop the technical knowledge, the collaborative process, and the dramaturgical rigour to make something this ambitious without losing what makes it dangerous. This project raises questions I cannot yet fully answer — about casting, about who has the right to tell this story, about what it means for a director to hold both sides of a story they are personally inside.
I also have two other long-term obsessions I keep returning to. The first is the collision between Western classical texts and Indian classical performance traditions — what Peter Brook did with the Mahabharata, but in reverse. What happens when an Indian theatrical body and an Indian theatrical logic encounters a Western canonical text? The second is a play about censorship — a production that keeps getting shut down, where the suppression itself becomes the theatrical language. Imagine a company trying to perform Tughlaq, the landmark Urdu play, but forced to do it in English because that is the only version the government will permit. The absurdity of that imposition — the violence of it, and the dark comedy of it — is the play.
These are not three separate projects. They are the same question asked three different ways: what happens when a structure designed to contain meaning is forced to hold something it was never built for?