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?