2001 Melbourne and other cities- Photo memories

 j

 

.

POSTCARDS FROM AUSTRALIA

                  Go to  :   Melbourne Video Memories

"The Last Saffron" - video

...Still searching for the right music to go with this: could it be the folk songs sung while collecting saffron? but i can't find them anywhere on the internet, if anyone reading this know about them do share about them. Could the music be the poet's favourite musician? For now, its just a few sounds...

RADIO/SOUND PROJECT - DEPRESSION-JUST ANOTHER MENTAL ILLNESS

Radio/Sound Project - Depression - Just another mental illness

as a classroom project reacting to the issues of depression to find parallels to the issue of depression that i grew up seeing my mother deal with!

DELHI SINCE 2012 - 2015

DELHI SINCE 2012 - 2014

Buddy..Photos of Buddy

All About Freedom - 14-8-1999

DELHI SINCE 2013 - 2013

Pages from the Trip to Srinagar 4th January 2011

Its been 2 years since the trip to Srinagar. (the winter following the August 2010 unrest).

Sharing a few pages that i scribbled on the flight and first impressions. 

Sharing them here for only a day or two.

More memories from family, childhood travel to Kashmir:

 

Watching Kashmir through 'Harud'

Watching Kashmir through 'Harud'

Does Harud match up to world cinema standards? Has Harud changed the cinematic fairytale about Kashmir preserved through Bollywood? Does Harud explain the Kashmir "issue"? How much will the DVD of Harud cost?

Do these questions really matter? I don’t think so. 

For me, they are as redundant as "issues and their promoters" for whom film-festival gloss or box-office entertainment value scores over blood spilt in real life.

What matters is a film like Harud got made and got released mainstream. What matters is another season lost in strife has some cinematic record where very few exist. 

As for "Bollywood" - even though I continue to adore Bollywood for 'some' of the gems and escape from reality it creates amidst all the obvious flesh-show, a film like Harud and Bollywood cannot really be spoken of in the same breath.

Rafiq and his friends are not likely to exist in a Bollywood film of this generation without being branded as either terrorists or tourist guides. Where else can their reality of making sense of life within conflict, in the fall of burnt chinar leaves and unannounced gunshots find a home, if not a film like 'Harud'!

The fairytales may have halted but cameras never left Kashmir - news cameras, occasional documentaries have captured shades of the conflict consistently, but the intimacy that cinema provides can’t be replicated by the excess of blood soaked tv, documentary or stock footage, neither can the irony of existing silently at the pace of life right in the midst of loud political drama that dominates life in this conflict zone. 

This duality reflected in the brilliantly etched character of the traffic policeman and of course equally brilliantly portrayed by Reza Naji who wades through the chaos of noisy traffic and himself exists in stoic silence, his seasoned eyes reflecting the age that would have seen the fairytale deteriorating into a blood soaked curfewed zone, perhaps each day, one day at a time.

The presence of the Armed Forces lingers consistently in the backdrop and foreground, and eventually gets surrounded by the collective silence of the Association of Parents of Displaced Persons, they still seek answers, whereabouts of their children who 'disappeared' within the conflict. The questions remain.

In another scene, Rafiq’s boss asks if he knows of any Kashmiri Pandit, Rafiq answers that he doesn’t. Although, the film-maker merely glances over the shoulders of a Pandit family who explain they are not keen to live in today's Kashmir, he doesn't make the circumstances in which they would have left in the first place, part of this story. And yet, it’s clear these too are people who 'disappeared' - from their homes. Those questions too, remain.

I can’t help but feel connected to the film, it takes me back to glimpses of a severed relationship that became my eyes to see life in contemporary kashmir till a few years back, when no such film existed. Now there is Harud.

Thank you Aamir Bashir and team, for preserving glimpses of life from a land, whose people are often conveniently forgotten and where life itself is capable of disappearing silently in the name of ‘conflict’. 

CLICK LINK TO GO TO PASSIONFORCINEMA BLOG EXCERPTS

Jammu Back-lanes

Picture Postcards for those who care about the Back-Lanes of Jammu!

DELHI SINCE 2012 - 2012

Remembering Sept 11, 2001, M17 - Routine interrupted – the world within the common room - 9/11

Remembering  Sept 11, 2001

M17 - Routine interrupted – the world within the common room - 9/11

Back in Melbourne...
Sept ‘01

The newness of the experience was wearing off and routine was taking over, friendship with words had not been struck yet, friendship with people however was growing.

The diary entries were turning drab, monotonous and a space for venting out what was possibly a first brush with ‘homesickness.’ There were lean phases, boring days, slow days, sad days, days of wanting to take the first flight back home, visit for a few hours and fly back asap. to own room and free space!
After writing out one such entry I went off for the much needed walk and followed up only a month later.

17th Oct ‘01


“…after I wrote the last few pages, went outside for a walk(wanted to get away), cried my heart out and went to the common room at 10 or 11 pm, sat down and watched the news and the rest is ‘history'. All of a sudden the news channels flashed a news story which had just reached them – the plane going into the World Trade Centre.

And then slowly and gradually news unfolded in real time and now the world is not the same and then I thought about what I had written in the previous pages and thought how foolish I had been. I mean, I have everything I could possibly want yet I don’t realize how fortunate I am. Well..it’s been a little more than a month since I put that down and I find myself in a similar state of mind again – a state of restlessness.
Maybe this is adolescent fervour reaching me at age 20 but I want to do something worthwhile, the whole clichéd thing about making a difference. The only thing is that my instinctive intentions are to make a spectacle out of the difference which is only rarely possible; people who make a difference are inconspicuous normally.

I didn't record any specific images or reactions to 9/11 in the diary, my mind was only beginning to make sense of the chaos that is the everyday-world today. that time was all hazy. But now, in hindsight, i recall the room, the television and the experience of watching, all so clearly, it must have impacted in some way...almost like a visual memory saved, frozen to be made sense of only much later..

In that common room...watching the wtc collapse in real time on television, tuning in to the american news channels and trying to make sense as the newsmakers themselves were. Was this real? or was this the extension of the 'hollywood myth'. and just when the unfortunate event was regarded done - the second plane surprised the news anchors and....the people watching of course.

In times like these, a crisis unfolding in real time, it is ironical, but the tv watching experience, brings with it a certain sense of unity, togetherness - that day it did.


The world that i wanted to see, was right there around that television, different nationalities, multiple cultures watching the television screen, reacting, unable to react....the world was right there in that common room that day....

the terror 'reminder' routine for 'spirited bombay' - terror tourism outside hospital gates! Life moves on as usual. (pics from July 14th)

Specially for those who sell the 'spirit of mumbai' in the name of your endurance..send them their favourite alcoholic drink like the one advertised over the bus-stand!