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Tithi Das's 'LIVELIHOOD' reflects on Shakespeare's notion that life is a stage, but reframes performance not as artifice, but as an essential part of being alive. Through everyday objects, domestic spaces, and acts of labour, the series explores how identity is continuously shaped through living, working, creating, and adapting.
When the Bard of Avon said that "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players," it would be correct to assume that Shakespeare meant we were always performing, every move of ours scheduled meticulously like an entry or an exit in a play. And when I first read this, I automatically assumed it to be a bad thing. That living came at a cost: acting, pretending, and that we all exist in archetypes and stereotypes, cycling through predetermined roles with no real agency of our own. There was something almost tragic in the idea. that authenticity was a myth, and that we were simply reciting lines someone else had written for us long before we arrived on stage.
But Tithi Das's LIVELIHOOD subverts that negative notion and makes that very performance the essence of life, rather than its betrayal. The series refuses to draw a line between performing and living — because perhaps there never was one to begin with. It steps into that blurred space, where those expectations fall silent, forming something beautifully aberrant, allowed to unfold — an artistry that belongs to no definition, unbound by who, untouched by when, unconcerned with where or what. Here, performance isn't a mask we wear to hide our true selves; it's the very medium through which the self expresses and discovers itself.
The series asks whether life and livelihood are really any less than a stage of their own. Every day we play our parts, face the unexpected, and quietly author our own stories — not from a script handed down to us, but improvised, moment by moment, in response to what living demands of us. We live, dance, laugh, cry, and create, and everything around us bears witness — a piece of furniture, a worn-out cloth, the smallest, most ordinary objects that seem to ask for nothing, yet quietly hold everything.
With time, they become companions and witnesses — holding the emotions of the lives we've lived through them. LIVELIHOOD is Tithi Das's meditation on this truth: that the courage to simply exist, raw and restless and free, is itself the performance, and the stage was never anywhere but here.
Perhaps Shakespeare wasn't wrong after all — only incomplete. Yes, we are all players upon this stage, entering and exiting through the chapters of our lives. But LIVELIHOOD reminds us that more than a cause for despair, it is, in fact, cause for wonder. To perform is not to lose ourselves in artifice, but to find ourselves in motion — in the daily rituals of survival that become art the moment we choose to see them that way. Tithi Das asks us to look closer at the stage we're already on, our homes, our worn furniture, our threadbare clothes
