Children of the Atom: On creating perspectives over grief

Recently, the theatre at Atta Galatta, a bookstore in Bengaluru’s Indiranagar was filled not with silent prayers but with thoughts, grief, life and struggles created out of the questionable choices of a nation that triggered a million deaths and left many to suffer. “There are movies and books detailing the tragedy, but they are almost always one person’s perspective, which is partial in a way,” said Tarun Chakraborty, curator of the event. Nischal Parthasarathy’s Military Complex went as follows, “No matter what the conspiracy, we have to agree that we are all in this magic show where the powerful and elite or the organisers and the media as the magician who distract you with war and arms race in the right hand while they steal your money from your own pocket with the left.” “I feel like I am abandoned because I belong to this place. “Or are we just born into violence, destined to trade in ache?” said Tarun in his concluding act of the show, adding “still impossible things need poetries to win important battles.” Each of the stories were creative and engaging; the poets had sharpened their pencils to weave their words to perfection in a bid to leave no tear or grief unnoticed. Though the show introduced the listeners to new perspective, one question still lingered, “Was there another way to end war?” The presenters of the show included Tarun Chakraborty as Albert Einstein; H. Todd Thomas as Heisenberg; Somya Tewari as Oppenheimer; Shruti Sharma as President Harry S. Truman; Henry Muthanna as Col Paul Tibbets Jr.; Sadhana Subramanian as Little Boy ; Subhash S. as a Japanese civilian; Ishan Capoor as a doctor in a burn ward; Sampada Joshi as a deformed child; Parisha Dutta as the Emperor of Japan, and Nischal Parthasarathy as the Military-Industrial Complex.