The auditorium at Kasthuri Srinivasan art gallery is half full. They have promised an evening of laughter with a show called KungFu Bonda by Bhargav Ramakrishnan.
Ramakrishnan, better know as Baggy, enters in a white night dress and yellow bedroom slippers and picks up a conversation with the audience, “I started doing this particular show one year ago. I turned 30! And that changed everything.”
He decided to “do something grown up”. So he moved into his own one bedroom apartment with seven grill gates!
“This is something very typical to middle-class homes. The house owner instructed me to close and latch each gate before I left home. What he doesn’t know is that there is nothing in that house to warrant this much security! There is only a chair and a mattress. After all, my roommate is unemployed and I am a stand-up comedian, which means that I am professionally unemployed.”
Baggy’s description of conversations with his mother leave the audience laughing. “Her biggest weapon is drama and she says that, if she can wait for nine months for me , she can wait for a few more hours to talk to me,” he shares and there is a shout from someone in the audience, “Just like my mother.”
Life for Baggy happens between meals, he discloses. “I am a big foodie and my favourite book is a restaurant menu card.”
A pizza fan, he is baffled at his father for describing that delicacy as a flavourless piece of bread. In fact pizza is the only good thing that came to India from Italy in the 1990s,” he declares, to the delight of the audience who greet his declaration of love for the pizza with claps and whistes.
He also explains how he has come to accept his age after some difficulty. “First there was denial, then anger, some bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. It is a step by step process, so now when a child calls me ‘uncle’ instead of anna , I accept it. I know I am an uncle now.”
