CHANDIGARH, July 21: "Everybody has a bit of puppetry within. For we had, at one point of time, played with dolls and imagined many fantasies making ourselves as protagonists. So my job is just to reorient the people into the form of puppetry." And Varun Narayan intends to do exactly the same here too in the week-long workshop for which he was brought by the Chandigarh Sangeet Natak Academy.Speaking to Newsline, Varun, who is on the faculty of the Mass Communication Centre at the Jamia Millia Islamia, noted: "I am willing to do anything for puppets because it provided me the means to explore myself and to break the normative stereotypes of the so-called social circle. Moreover, I could experiment with alternate kinds of sexuality and say through my puppets what I always wanted to say."Varun got involved in the world of puppets from childhood and was instrumental in introducing a course in puppetry for the postgraduate students of Traditional Entertainment at the MCRC. It was a bad beginning to an otherwise inspiring workshop, for due to a leaking roof the venue was shifted at the eleventh hour to Guru Harkrishen Public School in Sector 38 from the Sector 23 Government Model Senior Secondary School. But spread into two shifts, the workshop attracted about 45 participants on the first day.
