Hi Everybody,
Today exactly two weeks after arriving from India, I have decided to write a series of blogs about my creative project for Fall 2008 that I shot in India. I would like to share here some of my views, observations, learnings, and but ofcourse production experiences that I witnessed during the process of shooting this project in India. The title of the project is " Beyond Silence." This is a documentary project based on the lives of deaf people in the city of Mumbai ( Bombay). This video was shot for a period of about 2 months from June'08 to Aug'08.
I landed in India on 7th June'08 and started with the pre-production on 9th June. From there on it was a journey that was fascinating and intriguing filled with surprises, excitement, anxiety,at times frustration and yes of course immense satisfaction and joy too.
Before even my plane landed at the Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport of Mumbai, heavy rains started splashing the windows of my aircraft. It was 2:00am , and the flight had already got delayed because of the bad weather. The normal air journey to India from CA takes 24 hours and because of the delay, my air travel had got in its 25th hour!!! I was losing my patience.Tired, I sat inside the plane looking helplessly in the 'darkness' outside the window. I could not have ever imagined such a 'teary' start for my project. But I had no right to complain. I had decided to do the project in the peak monsoon season( June-Sept) of India. Amongst many other things, Mumbai is famous for its crowd, and monsoon. And I had planned for a semester now to fly half way across the globe to embrace both. What a timing indeed!
9th June, it was raining too hard, I was lazing on the couch enjoying watching the wet Mumbai around me from my parents home. I was heavily jet lagged, it was a perfect time to sip some chai, laze down in a blanket and chat with my family.
Instead I decided it to be the first day of my pre-production. I had to get on with it. After all it was rainy season, the weather was not going to change for the next three -four months!
My interpretor, Vidya Iyer, with whom I had communicated for the past four months, while working on the proposal, took me to her institute, The National Institute of Hearing Handicapped ( NIHH). Currently, she is pursuing her Indian Sign language studies there. It was late evening, very gloomy,Mumbai was getting beaten by heavy rains, and my heart was beating fast too. I dont know why, but I was a bit nervous about getting in to the actual doing of things. Its a strange feeling, but all through out my spring'08 semester, I was thinking, planning , and imagining about this day. Believe it or not, this was the first time I was actually going to meet deaf people. I had never had a personal interaction whatsoever with them through out my life. What??? well yes, I had only seen them around me, few times while in India. Bollywood definetly was a window at times to peep in to their lives. But never had taken this conscious step to actually go and meet them. Forget about shooting a film with them, my major concern at that moment was, what am I going to " talk" to them?
Within no time I saw myself amidst fifteen young people who were very busy 'talking,' but there was absolutely no sound, forget noise! After 10 minutes or so, that silence was deafening! I was yearning for somebody to talk, as in make some sound.....
It was a second level Indian sign langiage class, where all the students, were 'hearing,'( this is the term used by the Deaf in India to address non-deaf people), but were communicating only through "signs." For the first time it occured to me that I am 'hearing'!
After some time, the interpreter asked me to introduce myself and answer their question about " Why did I choose to make a documentary on the lives of deaf people in India?"
I started 'talking' as a hearing person, and she started 'talking/signing' as a non-hearing person. We continued this mode of communication through out the shooting of this documentary for about two months.
to be continued..........
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment