Man of Many Parts Dr. M. Prabhakara Joshi
In the cultural map of Dakshina Kannada Dr Prabhakara Joshi has a dazzling presence, and deservingly so.A professor of commerce and a teacher par excellence, Prabhakara Joshi's activities and fame happily spilled out of class-rooms to reach larger audience. His chosen area of interest and cultivation is Yakshagana, a unique
form of dance-drama that offers a package of poetry, music, percussion, dance, histrionics, and theatrical expositions of puranic or quasi-puranic themes. It is a very popular and cultivated theatre form in the coastal Karnataka, drawing both discerning and enthusiastic audience of young and old alike. It offers great visual effect even as it draws from our perennial reservoir of puranic stories, offering immense scope for dazzling enactments and creative interpretations. Summoning the gods and demons, heroes and anti-heroes, villains and clowns, extraordinary men and women to our midst, Yakshagana conjures up a world in which the real and the unreal, ideals and their defiance meet and get negotiated. Dr Joshi is a veritable treasure-house of its knowledge, both as theory and practice, and is acknowledged as one of its most
