The Headscarf

In a culture that thrives on the idea of choice, it seems reasonable to want to choose to wear a bikini over a headscarf. I say this with an awareness that this is my personal opinion. I am not interested in anyone agreeing or disagreeing with me. If someone is, then it is just the way the world is-people agree and disagree all the time.
But I did not grow up in a culture where wearing the bikini was on obvious choice. In my family the hijab or the burqa as it is called (mind not the burkha) was a way of life for my grandmother, aunts and cousins. My mother modified this tradition in the years we lived in Delhi by covering her head with a milder cotton gauze cloth rather than the black one. But even now I have nieces and sisters who wear the hijab/headscarf.
For a long time I was judgmental about those in my family who would cover themselves. It sort of bordered on a certain kind of understanding of them and I felt that they were not too brave. I would wonder why don;t they rebel and react. What makes some women so accepting of whatever is offered to them.
And then I came to America. This was 2009.
I am still wondering what has happened in these two years that in Feb 2012 I ordered my first headscarf.
I don't know if I want to wear it forever but I most definitely want to celebrate this feeling of walking on the streets bearing a strange anonymity. It seems like a practice that defies mechanisms of surveillance and it also takes away from the pain of being watched all the time.

A Separation: A Beautiful Film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjTkXGRhy9w


To say that I found this film beautiful would not be enough. Nor would it do justice to the layers with which the story is told. A very rare exploration of a middle aged man dealing with divorce, a daughter and a father suffering from Alzeimers, and a very human exploration at that. In the whole way divorce in Muslim cultures has been represented and understood, it has been the woman at the hands of a man and Shariah law.
Here is a rare and unique story of breakdown and the impossibility of dividing what we love and share.
The performances are brilliant beyond words and because I am doing a class on Actor/Director Improvisational Collaborations this semester, so much of the process of creating those performances was clearer. There were lines that just couldn't have been written and there were moments that had emerged out from developing backstories and subtext.
It is a pleasure to watch such a work of art and honesty.

visible video grain

I was recently writing about representations of Indian Partition, 1947 in Popular commercial Hindi film, namely with reference to Train to Pakistan and trying to answer for myself the reasons behind the narrative closure of a history that has essentially remained open ended despite being past. One of my motivations and fascinations was the recent reading of literature around Trauma Studies and Cathy Caruth's Freudian reading of Hiroshima Mon Amour.
If trauma is a form of belated address in the consciousness of the survivor, how does one read the creation of profilmic situations rooted in real dialogues, action and reaction shots?
This coincided with making final versions of The Ghetto Girl that if I am to go by suggestions of a friend, should include detailed text plates about Babri Mosque riots, Mumbai/ Delhi of 1992, Gujarat in 2002, the Batla House Operation among others.
I wonder if it is my pure incompetence or if it has to do something with the fact that it is impossible to produce an absolute picture when you are on the inside.
For that initial train that left in 1947 it was thought that the business would be settled once and for all.
But then there was a train in 2002 following which the streets of Gujarat very much reminded me of scenes from Partition in the documentary photographs of Margaret Bourke White.
So as I wrote that paper and am unable to write the absolute text plates of evidence, a testimony from the Gujarat camps that were set up in the aftermath of the ethnic strife, keeps coming back to me.
As I logged and transcribed it in an editing room as voluntary work with the Shared Footage Group, the woman recounted how they burnt her home and how she was witness to the killing of her neighbours.
After almost ten years, it is just her face and the visible video grain that I retain alongwith a feeling that I shall never be able to put together complete pictures.

deja-vu in Boston

As you get down from the South Street Station in Boston and walk towards Emerson College there is a very ordinary turn. Outside some superstore, there is a tree and people usually sit there when they either have nothing to do or are sick with too much doing.
As a kid I had fantasies of being a timeless traveller and that's perhaps the reason why I collect shot glass souvenirs of every city I visit. They sit on my refrigerator door and quietly remind me of the places that I can mark as visited on a rather obsessive map.
These travel fantasies from the past make me do really crazy things if travel is involved-I can carry reams and reams of paperwork through travel with a promise of sitting through a night in a dorm and meeting writing deadlines if it is a place I have never visited before.
At times I have sat through planes journeys of more than 24 hours but the place-ness of the destination is something that can relieve all travel related stress and I have found myself obsessively walking through city streets and figuring things out.

But this one road crossing in Boston- a place, a non place, an every place.
I can't say if I dreamt it the night I reached the city but the third day as I walked through it the first time, I had a feeling I had been here before.
And no. Not in my wildest fantasies had I been a traveller to Boston.
In the deja-vu, that place is inhabited by a Chinese family-the father wearing a white hat to ward off the sun. His fiver year old son perhaps whining for an ice-cream. A woman in red-aloof, apart. She is the mother to the boy.

It is this image that refuses to go. In doing so it reminds me of the ways there are places that look so similar to this-they are points on a map that spreads over Delhi, Bombay, Toronto, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Madrid, Jakarta...perhaps even more.
In post globalized times as places and markers collapse, what is it that defines a place?

For Nargis Aunty.

There is a narrow lane that leads to her home.
I learnt that she is no more.
but in the interstices that lay between the lane, door. hers and mine
I have discovered a spot that is full of memories-hers and mine.

Her face is always there.
It was there as I was playing a little postman in the afternoons
passing love letters between her son and his lady love.
It was there when I had folded my skirt a little above knee
and feared what if she quotes from the qoran if I meet her on the street.
It was there in the little box of pearl jewels she put in my palm.
I miss that warmth.

She forced us to sing Iqbal on the Republic Day function
She would order tents,food and celebrate in the street.
She would draw my mother into doing very crazy things.
A picnic on a hot summer afternoon in the Delhi Zoo to say the least.

May her soul rest in peace.
May she smile down on us reading this.
-March 29th 2011.

I don't want to pretend that this is a poem.
It is just an attempt at saving her memories.

Trailer: Four Women and a Room

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbPZEuRDTio

Listening to Kathryn Ramey

http://emerson.academia.edu/KathrynRamey
I have been editing from over 80 hours of footage shot over a year between New Delhi and Philadelphia. The footage ranges between cellphone videos, Flipvideo, HDV cameras, Canon 7D and the Canon 5DMarkII.
This is film about being homesick and being in love with a place. Can you miss a place like you miss someone you've grown to love? How do you deal with an absence of a place?
I had entered the listening of Kathryn Ramey's Lecture with some of these thoughts.
The rest of the notes are in my little paris diary.
but am putting little words here so that I remember:
sculptural editing
optical printing
film vs video vs 7D/5D MArkII
Vulnerability of character and vulnerability of film
Ektachrome
Jonas Mekas
Chris Marker
travelling matte technique in optical printing
anthropology has a tortured relationship with image
you've been conditioned by the images of the past into how you will look at images of the future
intersection of anthropological and avant garde
anthropology is what anthropologists do
Avant Garde practice: people who work in expanded networks of academia and institutions who seeks to push the boundaries in a way mainstream would not do.
Art Markets, Museums, Film
Maya Deren Robert Gardner
1980: Trinh Minh Ha/post modernism/Jay Reubes
Rupture od stories and many stories.