The India Association of Greater Boston  along with New England Leherein, presented Hindi Comedy Play “…Chale Hans Ki Chaal” on May 13 at Littleton High School Auditorium in Littleton, MA.

The play, directed by Avinash Padhye helped raise funds for both IAGB’s local community initiatives and Leherein projects in India.  

 

“Chale Hans ki Chaal” is a comedy play that revolves around the family of a distinguished freedom fighter who has given a trust that runs three charitable institutions in the hands of his four sons, according to organizers.  The three older sons are dutifully running the institutions and happily living in the glory of their father’s deeds.  The youngest one, however, has a carefree, easy going attitude and would like to live in the current world and not in the past glory.   

The play was a Hindi adaption of a Marathi play written by Prof. Vasanth Kanitkar. Avinash Padhya translated the play into Hindi. The acting and the direction was extremely powerful. Each character was splendidly enacted. Of special note was the acting by Hirkini Padhya who did a tremendous job of depicting the character of an Indian wife who while being dutiful is also extremely opinionated and does not cringe to give her opinions and stand up to her very bossy husband. While there were many familiar faces from Sach aur Sach ke Siva including  Anagha Singh, Suhas Marate, Abhijit Kanade, Hirkini Padhya and Avinash Padhya there were several new faces as well including Kedar Risbud and others. 

While the play was billed as a comedy, it was by no means a light hearted one. There were several strong messages embedded in the play. The transformation of the idealism of freedom fighters that has completely lost in modern day politics was a central highlight of the play. The playwright also clearly shows through the play that greatness does get passed on to sons of great men.  The greatness of the parent often becomes a big burden on the children who are intrinsically ordinary people.

The direction was very well done as were the backdrops. The comic timing was very good as well. Overall while the play was extremely well done, the accented Hindi spoken at fairly high speed made the play hard to understand at times and required rapt attention.  Hopefully the team can work on this for future production. 

  Kudos to the director Avinash Padhya for this bold attempt and we look forward to other productions in the future.