→ About the author :
Born in Delhi to a diplomat family in 1953, she went to boarding school in her teenage years. After college her determination to make her own way in life led to various kind of works in publishing and media related fields
She has authored a collection of short stories, called ‘Kleptomania’. Her most recent book, published in 2008, is titled "Escape".
Apart from writing newspaper columns she also created comic strips She created Suki, an Indian female comic character, which was serialised as a strip in Sunday Observer. Before 1997 she was better known as cartoonist and had a daily cartoon strip in ‘The Pioneer’ newspaper.
→ ‘Harvest’ :
Harvest is a futuristic dystopian play by Manjula Padmanabhan about organ-selling in India. It was first published in 1997 by Kali for Women.
The play takes place in a future Bombay in 2010. Om Prakash, a jobless Indian, agrees to sell unspecified organs through InterPlanta Services, Inc. to a rich person for a small fortune. InterPlanta and the recipients are obsessed with maintaining Om's health and invasively control the lives of Om, his mother Ma, and his wife Jaya in their one-room apartment. The recipient, Ginni, periodically looks in on them via videophone and treats them condescendingly. Om's diseased brother Jeetu is taken to give organs instead of Om.
Harvest won the 1997 Onassis Prize as the best new international play. The playtext was included in Black and Asian Plays, published by Aurora Metro Books in 2000.
Harvest is a play by Manjula Padmanabhan set in the near future that deals with organ selling in India. Aurora Metro Books published the play in 2003. It’s a critique on the commodification of the body in third-world countries.
Manjula Padmanabhan, a 21st-century woman, being a technocrat herself, uses the techniques and tools of the modern world in her most celebrated play, Harvest (1996). Though Harvest is not, as obvious, the first play Padmanabhan wrote, her fame as a playwright rests on it.
Padmanabhan drew the attention of the world when Harvest won the Onassis cash-rich
award for the theatre at Athens (Greece) out of more than a hundred entries.
The play confronts us with a futuristic Bombay of the year 2010. Om Prakash, a jobless Indian agrees to sell unspecified organs through Inter Planta Services, Inc to a rich person in the first-world for a small fortune. InterPlanta and the recipients are obsessed with maintaining Om’s health and invasively control the lives of Om, his mother Ma, and wife Jaya in their one-room apartment. The recipient, Ginni, periodically looks in on them via a videophone and treats them condescendingly. Om’s diseased brother Jeetu is taken to give organs instead of Om. Harvest won the 1997 Onassis Prize as the best new international Play.
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