Manav Kaul can’t stay still. For the 37-year-old playwright, theatre director, filmmaker and actor, life has been all about drifting from one calling to another. The wandering has not been due to aimlessness, though. It stems from a refusal to get complacent or to be straitjacketed by creative boundaries. So, despite the acclaim for his performance as an embattled security guard in search of a better life in Hansal Mehta’s Citylights, he displays no sense of having arrived in showbiz after 14 years of struggle. Instead, he seems impetuous, restive. “I want to do everything I possibly can,” he says. “Left or right, I want to take every turn in life.”
In fact, the Baramullah-born, Hoshangabad-raised Manav dabbled in "everything" as far back as he can remember. "English, Hindi, typing, judo, tabla. I used to try out just about anything in the hope that at least one of them will open the door that will help me escape Hoshangabad," he recalls. He eventually moved to Bhopal where he became a national level swimming champion. But two-three years of commitment was all that he could give to the sport. "I get bored of things when I am at the top," he says. So he got bored of swimming as well.
Chance took him to a play at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, and after watching it, he turned to theatre. In fact, he owes much of his grounding to Alok Chatterjee, a renowned theatre person from Bhopal, who opened Manav’s mind to world literature—Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Brecht. But restlessness struck him again and took him all the way from Bhopal to Mumbai. That was in 1999. Living in a chawl with five others, he spent time reading and discovering the modern Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla, his seminal works like Naukar ki Kameez, Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi. He remembers it as his "finest, happiest time". A workshop with late theatre doyen, Satyadev Dubey, a play with him called Inshallah and Manav started off on a long and chequered journey as a theatre actor.
He has been devoted to theatre, but after tasting success in seven or eight plays as an actor, he began feeling uneasy. “I began to wonder if that was what I wanted to do all my life. It was a bad phase, when I left everything and did nothing,” he says. The jadedness and his search for something new to do resulted in his first play as a writer, Shakkar Ke Paanch Daane. A monologue, it was performed by his long-time associate and friend Kumud Mishra, and was like a breath of fresh air on the Hindi stage. Illham, Park, Bali aur Shambhu followed. In 2004, Manav formed his own theatre troupe called Aranya. Despite being rooted in theatre Manav admits being influenced more by the written word and films. His play Red Sparrow is an ode to all the writers he has admired. Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love is a personal favourite and the inspiration behind his play on a father-son relationship called Peele Scooterwala Aadmi.