India, March 22 -- "I will not adopt the lioness on a cheesegrater."

This one quote from Aristophanes has been causing much amusement in classrooms across the world for a while now. Students will be students. The only time I taught Lysistrata, classical Greek playwright Aristophanes's anti-war comedy, there was no doubt in my mind that the tables were turned, and I had no power - only my students did - over the above quote. I, therefore, empathise with Atul Kumar, the director of Ambaa, a new theatrical adaptation of the Greek comedy.

Lysistrata was first performed in 411 BCE during the Peloponnesian War, at that time an equally farcical, devastating, and inconclusive war as the ones we are currently witnessing in different parts of the...