As temperatures fall, Calcutta greets the winter rush of performers from outside. Nandikar’s National Theatre Festival commenced this week and a bouquet of Bangladeshi troupes arrives later this month, but even before all this, we had harbingers of an exciting artistic season.

Open Doors’ presentation of Lushin Dubey’s trilingual Salaam India attracted large audiences. Scripted by Nicholas Kharkongar and inspired by Pavan Varma’s book, Being Indian, it started quite feebly with a glitzy number composed by Louis Banks and choreographed by Ashley Lobo, both miserably derivative. That song-and-dance partnership returned at the end for an equally superfluous exercise, making us wonder why someone so committed as Dubey settled for razzmatazz like this, unless for satiric purposes, as in taking a dig at these now-popular aerobic air-headed routines.The snippety, apparently undeveloped, skits that followed left us bewildered until it dawned on us that Kharkongar was connecting four representative situations in Delhi: abject life in a bustee, a middle-class building facing demolition by the municipality, a wedding in a well-off family, and a parliamentary committee debating the choice of India’s national dish. Except for the last, each story culminated in a chastising comment on ‘India Shining’: respectively, poverty endures; corruption thrives but even bribes cannot stall the bulldozing of illegal constructions; dowry prevails, and the would-be bride breaks the match, lodging an FIR against her prospective husband. One could argue perhaps that virtue and values eventually triumph.

Otherwise, the tenor of the production is comic and entertaining, the funniest scenes occurring in Parliament, where the culinary committee squabbling over tandoori chicken and idli-sambar threatens to split the country again along vegetarian/non-vegetarian lines. Dubey reprises her own virtuosity in multiple roles (picture, centre) and directs the three others in similar style, with notably superior portraits from Shena Gamat (left) and Andrew Hoffland (right), especially in the various accents they put on, from street Punjabi to Hindi, Tamilian English to NRI American English, and even Belarusian.

In Bengali theatre, Sayak celebrated its 35th anniversary with a festival inaugurated by Mukhosh, a Bengali group from Bengaluru, that staged the late Nabhendu Sen’s Mallabhumi. Mukhosh proved that Bengalis cannot discard their theatrical instinct even while slogging hard in IT and other industries in alien linguistic climes. Mallabhumi is a grotesque, absurdist play about an old cripple who turns out to be a man-eating rakshasa, acted with relish by Sayandeb Bhattacharya. Despite betraying traces of its amateur status, the young team was directed quite ably by Anindita Bhadra.