Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ah! Good old Caesar! Where do I even begin? My relationship with this particular play has been prenatal. Yes, prenatal! In fact, pre-the imagination of my existence!

Long before my mother even contemplated marriage and was a young, precocious nineteen year old, with infinite love for literature, she fell in love with Julius Caesar and the lines, Beware the Ides of March! not knowing that ten years later, on the Ides of March, her only daughter would be born.

Little did I know, as a kid, my birthday had been immortalised by the most famous playwright of the world and that I was born on a day anyone, who has read Julius Caesar , (which means almost everyone) would remember!

I must have read this play a million times, my first reading being when I was 14, where my mother read it out to me, changing her voice, expressions and mannerisms with each different character, making me love her even more than I already did! Yes, I remember I watched her with rapture in my eyes, watching her transform from the proud Caesar to the docile Calpurnia and the cunning Cassius to the gullible idealist Brutus, wondering Oh my God! This AMAZING lover of literature, this talented actress is my mother? My mother?

Almost five years later, as I presided over the History Association of my college, two sprightly girls came to me with the idea of enacting the play for a function. Almost instantly, my best friend and I set to work but then, on our conference, out in the lawns of MCM DAV College for Women, it became bigger and BETTER.

Why enact Caesar? we thought.
Why not make a parody of it and use it as a platform to address social, political and very, very MCM-al issues?

And we did! Act by act! Scene by scene. My friend's words, my direction and Julius Caesar Tadka Maar Ke (Tempering of Julius Caesar) became all the rage in our college, becoming so big that we were in the newspaper, on the radio, almost everywhere. We performed it twice in a row, for two years, the last time on March 10, 2012. The memories it created were fantastic.

A little way down the roads, on March 15, 2013, I was standing in front of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, gazing at the man whose immortal play had immortalised my birthday and added so many beautiful memories to my life!

Alright! Alright! Where's the goddamn book review ? you ask me. Seriously? Do you need one? Here's a play you could create a thousand beautiful memories with! Do you really need me to comment on its language, style, story? Just grab a copy and read it already!

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