New Course, New attitudes....

We have started with a new course about mobile filmmaking and its very very interesting. We are going to make collective films about the city. For this, we are interacting with some really interesting people and trying to understand what we are looking at. I have to talk to Street Vendors and ask them about their life and what they face in their lives. We are working with a few people who are trying to understand the city from an academic, but still involved perspective. They are trying to study it sociologically and in other "academic" ways. Yesterday was a very very pleasing and rewarding day as I felt a resurgence of my sociological self, as we were talking about different things from communalism to the caste system, Ambedkar, and the Nehru-Gandhi debate about nation building. There were some interesting points that came up in the discussion, and it really pleased me to even think that people in my department have had to learn to look at filmmaking with a different perspective. I hope they realised yesterday that filmmaking is not only an art, but an art with a purpose. So you can always have a film that creates a feeling in the viewers mind to build an attitude of a certain purpose to people's lives. People can feel hope when there is very little of it in their lives. The jobless can feel empowered, awareness can be raised through films and there are so many other things that one can write.....

This course is sure turning out to be interesting... it is genuinely very nice... It is making us think on some line which are not figments of our imagination, but are deeply rooted in the Indian society and have their context clear. The expression of this is what I am looking forward to in the next few weeks....