the black market in human organs continues to be the only solution for those who have no other assets to sell.

				it is a play about how the “first” world cannibalizes the “third” world to fulfill its own desires.

				“.....a dark, bitter, savagely funny vision of the cannibalistic future that awaits the human race...a parable of what will happen when the rich denizens of the First World...begin to devour bits and pieces of the Third World poor...”

				Padmanabhan’s notion of ‘winning by losing’ seems a disturbingly apt way to define the third-world individual’s predicament: lose your own body-part to win the cash.

				a darkly comic and unsettling tale of globalism and organ harvesting in India written by playwright Manjula Padmanabhan

				The play is set in the future, at a time when multinational companies have gone to the Third World not for software, minerals or fabric, but to harvest organs for their rich customers in America

				It’s about India and the gritty Third World reality.

				The play may be set in the future, but it reflects contemporary conditions as well,

				Om, a just-laid-off breadwinner for a struggling Indian family living in a cramped Bombay tenement, decides to sell his organs to a shadowy company called Interplanta in hopes of reversing his financial plight. Om’s family is monitored around the clock, receiving frequent video phone-type inquiries and directives from the supposed organ recipient, an icy young blonde named Ginni. Om’s mother falls into a stupor, constantly absorbed by programs on the TV provided by Interplanta. The family’s lives continue to go awry.

				India, one-third the size of the United States, has three times the population and almost 30 percent of its employable labor force out of work, he said, and the country’s biggest problems are overpopulation and inadequate education.

				For Harvest brilliantly allegorizes the relationship between the first and third worlds, literalizing the fundamental practice of globalization as its central situation: the third world provides the raw material that the first world consumes for its own survival and expansion.

				Ma comes nearly to worship Ginni, but truly idolizes her new television, finally choosing to entomb herself inside a video sarcophagus –called the Video Paradise –where she will remain for the rest of her “life”.

				It has since been distorting the culture and arts of economically weaker nations of the world.

				East Coast Artists presents Harvest, Manjula Padmanabhan’s award-winning play from India that centers on the international organ trade, at La MaMa Experimental Theatre from the 19 Jan - 5 Feb 2006.

				a futuristic satire on the trade of live organs from third world to the West.

				Harvest is a futuristic play about the sale of body parts and exploitative relations between developed and developing countries.