Amoolya Narayan

Amoolya Narayan is an actor, writer, singer-songwriter and theatre director based in Bangalore. She has a background in law and over 14 years of experience as a theatre practitioner.

Amoolya intends to create a dystopic science fiction tale that explores a future taken over by Artificial Intelligence (AI), where humans have no access to the internet. She wants to create this piece to reflect on our relationship with the internet, our usage patterns, and our dependency on it. She also wishes to underline how access to media and information through the internet is a human right but is available to many of us only in limited and distorted forms. Through this project, she will explore themes of censorship, net neutrality and how the internet, websites and apps get banned by various governments and regimes without care for user needs or consideration for constitutional rigour. She says in her proposal, “The ‘villain’ of the piece is a stand-in for unfeeling, totalitarian systems. At another level, it’s a loving ode to the internet and its wondrous powers.”

Amoolya will develop this piece by collecting stories from people across age groups and occupations by way of interviews and surveys to understand the impact of the internet on their lives. She will create the script and design the music for this piece while collaborating with a graphic designer to create illustrations for it.

The outcome will be a piece presented in the form of a dramatised reading with music performed live or pre-recorded over the internet, with illustrations being used to convey abstract ideas and add colour to it. The project’s deliverables to IFA will be documentation of the process and recording of the performance.

This grant is made possible under the special initiative 25x25, with support from lead donor Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, and philanthropy partners, Titan Company Limited, Priya Paul, and Sethu Vaidyanathan.