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Wikipedia describes Nautanki as "the most popular folk operatic theater performance forms of South Asia”. Nautanki was a name given to street acts or small time theatre. This is widely used when someone tries to act funny. fits more in the situation when something doesn't look real and looks more like an act of drama. This also means that the others are not able to accept your style of talking or cannot digest on what you say or do. It is a dying art, gradually giving way to theater which in turn is losing ground to films and now small series on youtube/vimeo/facebook/instagram and similar platforms have some Nautanki acts. In contemporary language, Nautanki is referred to drama, as in an act put by someone. 

‘Nautanki mat kar’ is a phrase which is often used to say “do not perform in public to get their attention”. In literal sense, it is used to describe a ‘drama queen’ in South Asia. Interestingly, if you search for meaning of drama queen on merriam webster Dictionary;  it shows: a person given to often excessively emotional performances or reactions. This is my most intended meaning of Nautanki . I started tagging my performance series as ‘Nautanki mat kar’ because these performances were literally done to probe the gender norms in my society. These acts were super sensitive and purgative for me. Most of these performances were done within a close and small circle of friends during ‘Adbi Baithaks’ (gatherings of artists and liberals) because of the safety reasons, hence most of the documentation doesn’t contain video footage. However, very recently few of these performances were recorded in video format and were exhibited most outside Pakistan and some with a lot of editing in Pakistan. 

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