2001 Melbourne and other cities- Photo memories

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"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’. 

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Jammu Back-lanes

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

DELHI SINCE 2012 - 2012