Playwright Anjali Parvati Koda’s unassuming personality belies the rebellious nature that shaped her career — a streak that enabled her to ‘always do things differently’ and also make a big jump from being a mathematics student in high school to co-founder of Samahaara, a theatre group.
The 24-year-old admits that writing has been a form of catharsis and helped her channel her creativity. “We have a family magazine and I used to contribute to the comic strip from the age of four,” recollects Anjali.
Before enrolling into an undergraduate course in mass communication at St Francis College, Hyderabad, in 2004 she had seriously considered joining the hallowed portals of IIT-Madras. “I realised it was not what I really wanted and decided to take a year off before joining another college. That is when we formed a theatre group, which officially came together in 2005.”
While on a break, Anjali worked as an assistant director and freelanced as a content writer for a movie website. “My family is connected to the arts but they had their reservations about me working as an assistant director,” recollects the writer who worked for a Nandi award-winning television documentary on ALEAP, an organisation run by women entrepreneurs in the state Andhra Pradesh.
Anjali, who claims to have been a geek before she joined St Francis, was crowned Miss Freshers on day one. “Being so warmly welcomed into the institute gave me a lot of confidence. It was a test of wit and intelligence than a talent show and I had enrolled just for fun. A lot changed because of this event,” she recollects.
The title and her curly brown hair earned her instant popularity among peers apart from a dedicated fan following in the college. “When I was in my final year, two of my juniors gifted me a bracelet. I was embarrassed then. Now I think of it as a sweet gesture,” she says.
A performer since childhood, she shies away from acting on stage, attributing it to the ‘pseudo-stage fear’ she developed over the years.
Working part-time throughout college and keeping up with writing hardly gave her any free time. “We were a very proactive bunch and managed to talk the principal Sister Christine Rebello into letting us participate in a Symbiosis University fest in Pune. It set a precedent of sorts in a college that’s known for its discipline.”
“I wasn’t very interested in sitting in a class and being preached to, so I chose to ‘let go of’ some classes to write and retrospect or catch a movie with friends at Prasad’s I-Max,” recounts Anjali. Her favorite bunking spot was a flight of stairs near the counseling room where she worked on her first script in the free time and coached her classmates in Maths
before exams.
Though the course was new and teachers kept changing like the dark arts department at Hogwarts (Harry Potter), she never missed her political science classes and worked extra hard on the subject. “The political science teacher made the subject so interesting that I looked forward to her classes every day and I wouldn’t have lasted if it were not for her. I used to score really well too. Unfortunately she had no favorites,” rues Anjali.
Koda’s pulse
Given her power of prose, Koda was on the editorial team of the department publication, The Pulse, and wrote the lead article for the first issue. Realising her calling lay in the field of literature, she went on to pursue a postgraduate programme in the subject through distance education.
Her love for literature is evident in the plays she has chosen to script till now, including the upcoming Gregor Samsa which is based on Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
— payal@newindianexpress.com