In this candid conversation, interviewer Vinta Nanda speaks with Prakash Vaswani about theatre, corporate life, cultural revival, and the persistence of artistic identity across languages, professions, and decades of creative engagement.

Prakash Vaswani is one of those rare cultural practitioners whose life tells the story of parallel journeys—one visible and structured in the corporate world, the other restless, creative, and deeply rooted in theatre, music, and cultural revival.

Long before professional life led him into environmental engineering and corporate project management, Vaswani was already a familiar voice and presence in Indian public broadcasting—first as a child artist on Doordarshan and All India Radio, then as a performer, writer, director, and teacher of dramatics across Mumbai’s most respected colleges and theatre groups.

His theatre journey spans languages, regions, and forms—Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, Sindhi, English—moving seamlessly between satire, political theatre, cultural memory, and deeply personal narratives. Whether performing Rishtey in three languages, directing socially resonant plays like Mr. India and Sabse Sasta Gosht, or later reviving Marathi and Sindhi cultural traditions through film, ballet, and television, Vaswani’s work reflects an unbroken commitment to the arts even when life demanded a corporate identity.

What distinguishes him is not only the scale of his work—over five decades across theatre, radio, music, film, and cultural documentation—but the quiet persistence with which he kept returning to the arts as an act of faith. From recording legends like Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammad Rafi, to directing devotional and cultural films seen across languages and continents, to creating Positive I Am, India’s only documentary on ALS that has travelled the global festival circuit, Vaswani’s career is a testament to how creativity survives, adapts, and eventually reclaims its space.

For The Daily Eye, his story is not just about theatre—it is about what it means to live with art as a lifelong calling, even when the world asks you to take another path.

Theatre And Parallel Lives

You began as a child artist and theatre practitioner, yet your professional life took you into engineering and the corporate world. At what moments did theatre refuse to let go of you and how did you negotiate these parallel lives?

Theatre artists, in many ways, are like swimmers. Once you learn swimming, it becomes part of your DNA. You may step away, but the instinct never truly leaves you.

Theatre is the same. Once you have lived as an actor, writer, director, or producer, it shapes your subconscious permanently. It trains your mind to observe, interpret, and respond. That thought pattern stays with you throughout life.

A very personal example is when I recently acted in a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, playing Mercutio. It was an ensemble cast of 18 actors from different regions and backgrounds. The play was set in 1970s Bombay and directed by Glenn Hyndon, an Australian by origin. I underwent nearly 40 days of training, not because I had forgotten theatre, but because I wanted to understand how younger actors learn, think, and process performance today.

Mercutio had to be portrayed as a senior gang member from 1970s Mumbai, while retaining the wit, humour, and cynicism of Shakespeare’s original writing. When I stepped onto the stage after almost 40 years, I realised something powerful. It felt as though I had never left. The muscle memory was intact. The sense of movement, voice projection, blocking, and positioning all aligned naturally within moments.

That experience reinforced what I have always believed. Theatre never leaves you, and you never truly leave theatre.

Theatre also gives you a deep habit of observation. Over time, you build a subconscious reference bank of human behaviour. Body language, gestures, voices, gaze, posture, even the smallest details like finger movements or the way someone holds silence. These unsaid signals become the raw material for characterisation and storytelling. Interestingly, this skill becomes equally valuable in corporate life, where understanding people is often the most critical capability.

I have always enjoyed negotiating between these worlds because I genuinely get restless doing only one kind of work. I like exploring fields connected to acting, storytelling, direction, and communication.

Engineering excited me because every problem is unique and demands a fresh approach. Theatre gave me purpose. Corporate life gave me structure and practicality. It taught me that theatre is not only an artistic expression but also an industry that must remain economically viable for everyone involved.

The truth is simple. Art survives only when it is supported. Theatre is an industry too, and profitability is not a compromise. It is what keeps the ecosystem alive.

Language And Performance Across Cultures

Your theatre work moves across languages, regions, and cultural traditions. What does performing the same play in Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, or Sindhi change for you as a director and actor?

At its core, the fundamentals of the character remain unchanged. The emotional truth and the intent of the role stay consistent.

What changes significantly is the language.

Each language carries its own cultural temperament, rhythm, and musicality. Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, and Sindhi may express the same emotion, but they do so through different textures. Their pauses, accents, expressions, and dialects bring unique shades to the same character.

As a director, you must understand not only the language but also the cultural context behind it. You must understand the region, its sensibilities, its dialect, and the way people naturally speak and respond.

As an actor, beyond the director’s guidance, you must allow the rhythm of the language to become part of your skin. Only then does the performance feel authentic rather than translated.

Having worked with legendary theatre institutions like IPTA and INT, and now consulting on theatre revival, how do you see Indian theatre evolving and what do you fear we may be losing?

Indian theatre, in my view, has historically relied heavily on adaptations, particularly of Western plays, plots, and narratives. This trend became strong in the early 1970s and has continued through the decades.

There is nothing wrong with exploring world literature. Global work broadens perspective and brings exposure. However, the concern is why we have continued to prioritise adaptations so disproportionately, when India has such vast literary wealth and cultural diversity of its own.

At times, it feels like we are presenting an imitation rather than owning our original identity. An adaptation may succeed with audiences, but it remains an adaptation, rooted elsewhere and reworked for Indian sensibilities.

What worries me is that we hesitate to dive deeper into our own literature. India has unmatched cultural richness across languages and traditions, yet we often lack confidence in presenting Indian authors, especially contemporary voices or writers not known beyond their region. The reason is simple. Original Indian work feels less commercially safe.

Even today, I see theatre groups choosing adaptation after adaptation rather than exploring authentic Indian stories, and that is unfortunate.

At the same time, I do see a positive shift. We now live in a global village, and contemporary themes are finding greater acceptance on stage. Subjects around identity, sexuality, and evolving social realities are increasingly being explored.  

The audience is still being nurtured, but the change is visible.

Theatre is also adapting to modern attention spans. The traditional three-act structure is less common today. Productions are sharper and shorter, often between 90 minutes to two hours. Theatre groups must reinvent their storytelling to remain relevant, without losing artistic depth.

These are exciting times because we have an opportunity to take our stories, our culture, and our languages to the world. Theatre is live communication, and communication is always a two-way street. Actors, in the truest sense, are reactors who respond to the energy in the room.

Language itself is evolving, and theatre must evolve with it. If we embrace that transformation, the world truly becomes our stage.

Cultural Revival And Responsibility

Your work in cultural revival, particularly Sindhi language and traditions, spans stage, film, web series, and ballet. Do you see cultural preservation as activism, documentation, or storytelling, or all three?

The Sindhi community post-Partition had to rebuild itself from scratch. In many ways, we rose from the ashes like a phoenix. Despite not having a state of our own, Sindhis became global citizens, deeply loyal to the places and countries where we built our lives.

Our resilience and business acumen are often spoken about, sometimes even misunderstood, but they come from an instinct of survival. However, in the process of blending into the world, the collateral damage was our heritage, especially our language.

Sindhi culture has survived largely because a few artists, singers, musicians, and theatre practitioners kept it alive through performance and entertainment over seven decades. As a community, we have contributed through colleges, hospitals, cinema, entrepreneurship, and service to society. But language remained the deepest loss. A community without its language faces the risk of losing its identity.

Even today, we continue to struggle for rightful space, whether it is in national platforms or in gaining wider recognition. It is unfortunate, especially when Sindhi is one of the oldest languages, with roots tracing back to the Indus Valley Civilization and Mohenjo-Daro.

So, to answer your question, cultural preservation is not only activism, not only documentation, and not only storytelling. It is all three.

Corporate Life And Creative Sustainability

Looking back, do you feel the corporate years distanced you from art, or did they unknowingly equip you to sustain and structure your creative life in ways pure artists often struggle with?

My corporate years did not distance me from art. In many ways, they strengthened my ability to sustain it.

Corporate life taught me structure, planning, execution, and most importantly, sustainability. It helped me understand how theatre can be organised in a way that is professional and financially viable, so that artists do not spend their lives struggling for survival.

A true artist belongs in the creative space, not in a constant battle for livelihood. Art should not be reduced to suffering. It should prosper.

That is why corporate involvement in theatre is welcome. It is not about compromising creativity. It is about enabling survival and progress. Art must survive, and artists must thrive. Only then can theatre continue to evolve and remain alive for generations. 

Power And Responsibility, Leadership Under Lens, Influence Examined, Authority And Accountability, Public Figures In Focus, Power Structures, Who Holds Power, Decision Makers, Legacy And Impact,