A Conversation With Kunal Kapoor

In this intimate conversation, Pooja Bhatt sits down with Kunal Kapoor to trace the living legacy of Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre—not as an institution, but as a home shaped by memory, ritual, and artistic discipline. What emerges is a portrait of a family for whom theatre was never merely performance, but a way of life.Kapoor reflects on deeply personal traditions—from legendary Christmas lunches to memories of a Goa that existed before it became a destination—and on the quiet resilience behind Prithvi’s enduring ethos: the show must go on. That belief was tested most profoundly after the loss of his mother, Jennifer Kendal, yet it remains the moral spine of the theatre she helped build.The conversation moves fluidly across questions that matter today: the fragility of true patronage in a culture increasingly governed by commerce, the challenge of funding theatre without hollowing its soul, and the responsibility of preserving memory in an age that forgets too easily. Anecdotes like the now-mythic “Chamcha Room” sit alongside reflections on books, paintings, and archival labour—acts of care that reveal Kapoor as both custodian and chronicler.This episode is less an interview than a meditation—on legacy without nostalgia, on art sustained by discipline rather than spectacle, and on the quiet truth that legacy is not preserved here; it is practiced.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.