Ramu Ramanathan

Ramakrishnan Ramanathan, known as Ramu Ramanathan, is an Indian playwright and director. He has written plays including Mahadevbhai, Cotton 56, Polyester 84, Jazz, Comrade Kumbhakarna, and Postcards From Bardoli.

His book 3, Sakina Manzil And Other Plays, is a collection of eight plays, published by Orient Blackswan in collaboration with the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU).

Besides playwriting, Ramanathan is the editor of PrintWeek and WhatPackaging? magazines. He has been associated with the print industry for 30 years.

He is the author of three books. 3, Sakina Manzil And Other Plays which is a collection of eight plays. And, two collections of poems, My Encounters with a Peacock and To Sit on A Stone - And Other Shorts.  In addition, he pens columns for newspapers.

He has also co-edited Book Binding with Adhesives along with P Sajith and Babri Masjid, 25 Years ... along with Irfan Engineer and Sameena Dalwai.

Early life
Ramanathan was born on 29 December 1967 in Kolkata and later moved to Mumbai. He completed his schooling at St. Stanislaus High School, Mumbai. In 1987, Ramanathan graduated from Mithibai College with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. That same year, he wrote his first one-act play, I Am I. Later, he completed his Diploma in Journalism from Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai, and an MA in English Literature from the University of Mumbai.

Later, Ramanathan wrote 13 one-act plays for inter-collegiate competitions. He also wrote radio plays and radio documentaries for AIR, produced by S. D. Prins, a rare motivated officer in Akashvani. Along with Sunil Shanbag, he explored alternative spaces for plays, such as on top of a water tank at the YWCA in Andheri, which was transformed into an amphitheatre. He founded and organized the IIT Theatre Fest in 2006 with Raja Mohanty at the IDC in IIT. For ten years, he edited a theatre journal for Prithvi Theatre called PT Notes, published by Sanjna Kapoor. Later, he co-edited the eSTQ bulletin from 2005. He also ran a play-reading movement for many years, in which more than 75 unperformed and unpublished plays in English, Gujarati, Hindi, and Marathi were read in front of an invited audience.

Publications

 * Combat, published by National School of Drama (2003)
 * Collaborators And Mahadevbhai, Sahitya Akademi (2006)
 * Tathasthu ("So Be It"), in The Little Magazine (2010)has
 * Mahadevbhai (in Marathi), Popular Prakashan (2011)
 * 3 Sakina Manzil and Other Plays (in English), Orient Blackswan (2012) - An anthology of eight plays: Shanti, Shanti It’s A War; The Boy Who Stopped Smiling; Curfew; Mahadevbhai (1892–1942); Collaborators; 3, Sakina Manzil; Shakespeare And She; Jazz.
 * Book Binding with Adhesives along with Tony Clark and P Sajith
 * My Encounters With a Peacock, Red River (2017)
 * Babri Masjid, 25 Years .. along with along with Irfan Engineer and Sameena Dalwai (Gyan Prakashan) (2017)
 * To Sit on A Stone - And Other Shorts, Red River (2020)
 * Mumbai Murmurings: 213* Tiny Tales of Theatre (Manipal Universal Press) (2023)
 * Two plays: Cotton 56, Polyester 84 and Comrade Kumbhakarna, Red River (2023)

Theatre experience
In 1993, Ramanathan wrote Shanti, Shanti, It's a War, which won Best Play at The Hindu - All India Playscript Competition. This play was produced by Madras Players. It was penned in 1992, within the first ten days after 6 December.

In the mid-nineties, he wrote and directed a Gripps play (a children's play) called The Boy Who Stopped Smiling, which was performed in approximately 150 shows. More than one hundred of these shows were organized by Sanjna Kapoor, the play's producer, who created a theatre network across the country.

Ramanathan directed Vaikom Mohammed Basheer’s Me Grandad 'Ad an Elephant and later Marguerite Duras’ L’amante Anglaise (both with university students), as well as Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, Jean Genet’s Deathwatch, Václav Havel’s Audience, and a play called Nothing (for V Theatre Group).

Similarly, his collaboration with a group of architecture students resulted in three plays and another piece called PM @ 3 pm. This group hosted 7-day workshops on set design and theatre aesthetics, and fabricated four model sets of King Lear for four language theatre directors in Mumbai. Later, the group staged three student productions: Yaar, What’s the Capital of Manipur!; The Sanjivani Super Show; and Medha and Zoombish – II.

Ramu Ramanathan has conducted workshops for students and taught at KRIVIA, IDC (IIT Powai), the University of Mumbai, and Symbiosis (Pune). He has also been associated with at least 20 educational institutes across the country.