There’s a version of a Friday night in Mumbai where you dress up, show up, and politely applaud. This wasn’t that. It opened with Shostakovich. The Waltz No. 2, played by Dmitry Yablonsky and the Russian State Symphony Orchestra. Tesseract - The Geometry of Truth carries this quality of feeling like a memory you can’t quite locate, grand and melancholic at the same time. As an opening for a show about truth and time, it was a choice that told you immediately this evening was going to be serious about itself.
Meera Jain’s creation at NCPA to mark 187 years of The Times of India, is one of those rare evenings that keeps raising its own bar and then clearing it. My partner put it best, sitting next to me: every time we thought this is the moment, this is the peak, something bigger was already on its way.
Shiamak Davar’s dancers are extraordinary on any given day. Here, you’re watching the best of his best. The stage carries a hundred of them, and when the Michael Jackson medley arrives, the stage turns into something between a theatre and a Saturday night you want to hold onto. We were dancing in our seats. Billy Joel’s She’s Always a Woman came at a quieter moment and landed completely differently, tender, almost private, in a room full of people.
What stays with you is how the screens work. They shift the entire emotional register of each scene, and in a show that moves through 187 years of history, that’s everything. You’re watching India change. You’re watching the world change. And on those screens are front pages you grew up reading, headlines that were once the morning, now sitting quietly in an archive. That’s a strange and moving thing to confront on a Friday night. The Times of India is old enough to have witnessed everything, and the show knows it.
The AI integration gave the whole production a sense of inevitability, as if the show understood that it exists at a turning point, between the century of print and whatever comes next.
You leave carrying a book. A record of the chapters you just watched. I sat with mine later that night, actually sitting with it. Which tells you something about the kind of evening it was. 187 years is a long time to publish the truth. Tesseract does it justice.
Ankur Chaturvedi is the co-founder of Wife, an independent creative agency.
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