Amit Ohdedar is the founder and president of Prayas, New Zealand's largest South Asian theatre company. Photo / Dean Purcell
By day, Amit Ohdedar is the contracts manager at a refrigeration and air conditioning company, by night he is president of Prayas, New Zealand's largest South Asian theatre company. Building on 17 years of theatrical success in Aotearoa, Prayas present their latest production, Dhaba on Devon Avenue. Written by American playwright Madhuri Shekar, this riveting work about inter-generational family tension will have its world premiere at TAPAC, May 26 to June 5.
I grew up in Calcutta, not far from where the River Ganges flows into the Bay of Bengal. My father was chief librarian at Jadavpur University and we lived on campus. This made for quite a homogeneous neighbourhood because everybody around us was connected to academia. It was also lucky for me, as it meant I was given a good education. Even though academia isn't that well paid in India, we were middle-class with a comfortable standard of living and much better off than the general population.
I was born in 1959 and we moved to the campus in 1965; before that, we'd lived onsite at the National Library in Calcutta. Considering my general interests, I would probably have been better suited to the fields of history, or literature, yet all around me, people studied engineering. Jadavpur University was also well known for its engineering faculty, and in India engineering meant better job security.
When I was young, I'd play with the other children on the sprawling fields of the campus. There were many bodies of water where we'd catch fish with hand lines. When it flooded during monsoon season, we'd play football in ankle deep water, which was great fun. It was a simple, safe, secure world.
I was born into a Hindu family but we weren't really practising. My father was quite agnostic, although my mother would do her rituals. She had her own deity at home where she made offerings both evening and morning, but beyond that, I had a very liberal upbringing. It was also quite a political time. When I was about 12, in the early 70s, I saw some of the student protests and Indian police aren't like Kiwi police. They're much more heavy-handed and sometimes there was violence.
I was expected to study engineering, but I made the most of all the extracurricular activities of university. I joined the drama club, the film society and the mountaineering club. But in India, when you start your working life, the pressure of day-to-day life becomes quite overwhelming and the hobbies have to stop.
After working for about 14 years, I reached a stage in my career where I had to leave Calcutta for greater opportunities. My options were Delhi or Bangalore, where the economies were stronger. But India is like Europe and each province has a totally different language and culture, so both Bangalore and Delhi would've been foreign to me.
At this same time, New Zealand was opening up, and taking more general category migrants based on qualifications. Back then, because I regularly went to Delhi for work, during one of those trips, I asked the taxi driver to take me to the New Zealand High Commission. It was 9.30 in the morning, and nobody was there. The taxi stopped, a person opened the gate and in I went. They gave me a self-evaluation form. You got so many points for your age, your degree, your work experience, so I filled it in and gave it to the receptionist. She looked it over and said, "you qualify, so you can apply", and she wished me the best of luck.
This was about March 1994, and six months later, in September, we arrived at Auckland Airport, me, my wife, our eight-year-old son and three suitcases.
When we moved, we upset our parents on both sides especially my wife's mother, who was very attached to my son. She wouldn't talk to us for many months, but in the end they understood.
For a short time we stayed at a backpackers on Fort St, our first experience of Auckland. We loved those early days. My routine was to get up early, go to the dairy, buy the Herald, look through the property section and start phoning landlords for a house to rent. I also looked for jobs, because we were focused on settling down and finding a place to live so our son could start primary school. My accent meant, quite often, the landlords I called would say the property was gone. Auckland was still getting used to new people because if you dial back to that era, it was predominantly white and light brown. One common question was, "are you a Fijian Indian, or an Indian Indian?"
My first job was for a small ventilation company. I worked for them for a year, then in 1995, I joined a large commercial air conditioning and refrigeration company. I've been with them ever since and I'm very happy there. It's as if I'm part of the furniture.
When you arrive in a country with just three suitcases, you want to make connections and create some of the things you miss, because when you leave your own country, you realise how important your culture is. How it's part of your soul, so the desire to maintain our culture was very strong. Also, we didn't want our son to forget his roots.
We connected with other people from Calcutta and in a few years, as our numbers grew, we formed a Bengali society. Bengal is well known for its culture, for plays and movies. India's only Nobel Laureate in literature, Rabindranath Tagore, he came from Kolkata, so in 1998 we started doing plays in Bengali. We also wanted to make our own fun.
Those early plays went really well and they became an annual affair. Then, to transcend the language barrier, we started performing in English. That was the genesis of Prayas Theatre, and our audiences kept growing. Prayas means "endeavour" or "effort", and through the medium of theatre we were able to share our culture with the wider community.
We never thought Prayas would last this long, but we've come a long way since we started this journey. A big part of our success has been collaborating with other community groups and connecting with industry professionals who have been very generous to share their knowledge which has enhanced the quality of our work.
I do miss Calcutta and family, of course I do, but I make up for that through being involved with theatre and art. This is my reaction to missing my culture, and because Prayas is a platform for new migrants to forge social connections, we've all become friends, which makes the company feel like a very large family.
India has a caste system, and I'm very aware that my reasonably privileged upbringing was because of my family circumstances. Although I didn't know this as a kid, but when I was older my father told me that one of our ancestors about 400 years ago was actually a lowly fishing boy. Under the caste system, I should have stayed a fisherman, but that young ancestor eloped with a local princess and the king had to choose between a mercy killing or accepting the union. As the legend goes, because the king was powerful, he was able to take that fishing boy out of the caste cycle by giving him wealth and education. That's how my ancestors went up the ranks. So my father having a PhD and being a librarian, was all because of that young chap 400 years ago. I have always been aware of the many forks in my road.
I truly believe life cannot be perfect, because it's an imperfect world. We have so many unfulfilled ambitions, missed opportunities and what ifs and unless one reconciles with that, and accepts those limitations, life will be frustrating. In Bengali culture, we have wandering minstrels called Bauls. They live on the fringes of society and share their thoughts through music. They have a song that says something like, life is like a flowing river and the trick is to try to stay somewhere around the middle, because in spite of the uncertainty, in the middle is where happiness lies.
I find that a very useful philosophy for life. Having grown up in a different culture, I see New Zealand society as very fair and kind, tolerant and harmonious. In spite of all the aberrations, I feel so lucky that these concepts are considered virtues in Aotearoa, because they're in short supply in the rest of the world.
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