Kanthashilon, a creative cultural organisation, will stage a play titled ‘Ja Nei Bharatey’ today, at the National Theatre Hall of Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy (BSA), Segun Bagicha in the city.
Playwright Manoj Mitra’s take on the great epic, Mahabharta, is from a very different perspective and hence, very contemporary and refreshing.  For Kanthashilon, the play is directed by Mir Barkat. Zunayed Yusuf is the stage designer and light director. Asim Kumar is the music director of the production while Dilruba Sharmin and Airin Parvin Lopa are in  choreography and costume design.
The Bengali proverb ‘ja nei Bharatey ta nei Bharatey’ means ‘whatever is not in the Mahabharata, does not exist in India. In ‘Ja Nei Bharatey’, it also means ‘All that remains unsaid in the Mahabharata’.
Beginning before the birth of Dhritarashtra and Pandu, Manoj Mitra’s Bengali play ‘Ja Nei Bharatey’ traces the cross currents of aims and desires which shape the time. The play questions the miraculous birth of the Pandavas and the Kauravas and what makes Dhritarashtra take up weapons or rush into leaping flames. “The new angle in this play is that I am talking about all the lapses which people ignored — genuinely or intentionally — in the story of the Mahabharata,” said Mitra and adding that, “I want to fill the blank portions in our epic. There are logical justifications to the most unbelievable portions of the Mahabharata.”
Without distorting the epic text, the play looks rationally at all that led to the great conflict, taking the side of nature, wilderness and the neglected outcasts of society.
The play raps the ancient roots of culture, testing the knowledge embedded in the Puranas with the new awareness in the age of globalisation and scientific progress. In this new perspective, stereotype characters like Shakuni, Pandu, Ambika, Gandhari and others acquire new lives, and a  few new characters step out of the shadows.  
Participants include: Abdur Razzak, A K M Shahidullah Kaiser, Sohel Rana, Ananya, and Faria Akter Soma, among others.

Where: BSA, Segun Bagicha
When: 7pm, today l