Synopsis
You have a place called ”your world”. What happens when the conflicts & contradiction in this heavenly place of your own cross their bearable limits and become crushingly overwhelming? Is there a way that provides escape? Is there a path that may take you to a province of denial of the humiliation caused by such pressures?
And if, in such a situation, one is provided with a path of escape designed by one’s trembling, unstable mind, where will the path take oneself? What will one finally manage to hold in hands?
The word ‘shillak’ literally means savings; funds set aside or something that is left behind. Every time a society faces a socio-economic change, left behind are the echoes of the demands by that change, in the minds of the sufferers. What the next generation inherits from the past is the cracked, the fractured and the uncertain present.
An average middle class family generally depends entirely on the father, the head of the house, for all necessities. Shillak peers into one such home and brings out the deep-seated distortions in its image brought about by these times of retrenchments and lay-offs.
Playwright’s note
Being 31, I already have knelt down before the ‘system’, before the ‘noise in the city’, before ‘every such thing’. I find it very hard to convince people about my wish / desire at a given minute.
I find it difficult to match the pace with my city.
AT times it feels better in the surreal world, in the imaginary world than being in the present. There is no one around me to disturb me inside my world inside me!
I easily identify with the void inside the mind of the central character of Shillak. His comfort in the surreal world for his reaction on his conditions is quite close to my comfort with the surreal.
