A collection of writings at FTII in the course of learning to make a film
�In the stories he�d read so far Father said that all the Parsi families were poor or middle-class, but that was okay; nor did he mind that the seeds for the stories were picked from the sufferings of their own lives; but there should also have been something positive about Parsis, there was so much to be proud of...
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This dissertation was to have been on Aravindan. The few films I had seen of his oeuvre � Thampu, Kummaty, Esthappan � had charmed me with their deceptive simplicity, and left me with a feeling I found difficult to articulate in words. That, coupled with the paucity of written material on Aravindan and his films, made writing this dissertation a personal challenge I was eager to take on.
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In 1989, I went on a camp with my Boy Scouts troop to Davier, a coastal village on the border of Gujarat with Maharashtra. Davier was one of the many villages in Gujarat where Parsis had settled down in substantial numbers and established community institutions like agiaries (fire-temples) and dokhmas (Towers of Silence). Ours being a troop consisting entirely of Parsis, one of our activities was a visit to the agiary. It wasn�t the first time I was going there. I had come before in 1982, again on a camp that also included a visit to the agiary. But this time, it was a different experience.
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�I have nothing to say / and I am saying it /
and that is / poetry / as I need it.�
- John Cage, �Lecture on Nothing�
Music and I have met a few times, but we remain strangers at best. And though we have even worked together, we remain indifferent to each other, not comfortable with each other, not understanding one another, not communicating. The chemistry is just not there.
Now, we are being forced to work on a film together.
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