[6] At the outset, we are shown an apparently lifeless dummy figure, sprawled on the floor, with just a leg raised and propped on a chair next to a table decorated with several books, such as Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto.

[6] A light-hearted overture allows the audience to take on a key theme throughout the play which relies on an implicit parallel between words as tokens and money: both secure meaning and value by the mechanisms of circulation, and both shape our lives.

[7] On arriving in Mumbai, Marx is keen to visit Mani Bhavan, a museum dedicated to Gandhi's memory, only to find the gatekeeper, a stickler for the details of correct opening times, will not let him in.

There, Marx observes acutely the odd contrast between those who visit the temple to pray to the god for his beneficial intervention, and the beggars who sit outside entreating these same religious visitors for some pittance to help them get through the day.

Located in a crowded chawl, the gritty realities of this building and the impoverished quarter around it prompt Marx, sprinkling his memories with bits of German and French to underline his cosmopolitan background,[7] in Berlin, London and the United States: he explains to the audience that the theatre manager wouldn't let him talk unless he could entertain the audience with interesting stories,[6] and thus he recalls also his early life of humble dwellings, his ambitions to become a poet, his drinking days as a student in Trier, the penury and incomprehension of even his family he had to put up with as he struggled to finish his masterpiece, Das Kapital in London's Soho.

The basic facts of Marx's life and thinking are set forth woven with homespun truths, iconoclasm and intellectual challenges to preconceived ideas, all threaded with a comic vein.

The piece could be challenged as too simplistic, but some accommodation was necessary if the play was to achieve its aim of hinting to an audience predominantly raised on a greed-is-good ethic that the Marxist analysis of capitalism merited consideration.

[1] Deepa Punjani noted the novelty of introducing into what she considered a rather frivolous tradition of theatrical entertainment, a one-man show in which the global figure of Karl Marx comments on what he sees in the Gujarati world.

He felt the difficult ideas from Marx's magnum opus Das Kapital and Communist Manifesto, which he co-authored with his lifetime friend Friedrich Engels, were presented interestingly.

Manoj Shah's production was subtle in the way it engaged the actor to speak, in what was admittedly a long monologue that might strain people's powers of attention (90 minutes), in such a way that the talk gave an impression of lively improvisation.