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The phrase pro-audience carries two correlated meanings. The first one is to look out for the like minded people to share one’s ideas. Unless you had a group of people willing to listen to you, it would be futile to speak your heart out. More than futile, it would be intruding and intimidating in nature. The second meaning of the same phrase is to payback your listeners in the same spirit they came showering at you; which also means to try to entertain them while keeping their sensitivities, likes and dislikes all into your account. It doesn’t mean you started being populist or began forcing your ethos upon them. On the contrary, being proaudience means, speaking up things in as much balanced ways as you can; specially if you knew, you were about to hurt your audiences in some manner, then you would also try to see from their view points, if not completely agree with them.

While observing theater in Ahmedabad a few years ago, I had seen audiences going back dejected from theater shows. They would come hoping to watch inspiring, live acts unlike what they might get to see in front of the television and cinema screens, but would end up completely being overlooked in the end. Obviously, those on the stage were performing just to achieve academic targets and not to use the same as a tool for communication. They would stage the same adaptations time and again, lecture on the bygone virtuosos, invite other theater groups into discussions, clap and felicitate each other on the slightest provocation, grab various grants, including those from the state, and that’s it! Nowhere will the audience matter in this whole exercise. Nowhere will they try to come forward with original ideas, so that the listeners felt privileged. Even the theater critics would write down raring words about the same stage productions later that the audience may have found lackluster in mood, in general.

In these circumstances, I started toying up with the idea of a pro-audience stage where the stage would do its best to take into account of the audience’s view point as well. Even though, my encounters with the stage got fewer during the last few years, the mood and spirit of the phrase “proaudience” has kept accompanying me all along. It applies now to my own attempts at gathering an audience for my own weblog. One can not fool all the people on all occasions, somebody said so. Therefore, I’ll have to take care of various view points as I go on unfurling my own thoughts now. Hard to do so in practice no doubt, with the kind of diverse subjects I’m planning to move forward with. Sports, society, politics, cinema, theater and meditation are some daunting areas that I’m going to dig into in the coming weeks and months, specially from the Indian perspective, and it’ll always be hard to be in the pro-audience mold, one knows. But, I’ll try out my best and we shall see where we find each other in the later course of this sojourn.