12/26/07

Travelling, an afterthought

Very often I feel a sense of redundancy in a life spent in the city. I fortunately had an exposure to 'other' worlds since I was a child, the country the remote areas and of course along with that of poverty and marginalization. How and where all does the human kind live in our country? A deep and genuine curiosity to explore cultures and people has subsequently taken me to places and to people I cherish in my heart.
I made a few films, again to explore people and human emotions in relation to changing spaces and landscapes of human behavioral patterns. I was testing my own eye through the camera.
I have worked with tribal communities of Gujarat, the Bheels and those of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands,the Nicobarese with video and visual documentation as my 'permit' was to go there with my eyes wide open and mind as perceptive as possible. It changed me inside out. Video film is a new found language and fascinating enough for me to ride on. It is so much about interaction and talking that it gave me a different space to explore self, through extremely powerful people and cultures and environments around me.
To someone who came from limited cultural experience, a huge range of human scape was struck. And it did strike very hard!
The process had started centripetally. There was a whole new world asking me questions that I was asking myself. Today, it helps me to know myself differently exactly opposite to what it was earlier. My journey now starts from self and not from the surroundings I explore. Of course this is a gradual, painful and soul searching process. But today it has relieved me and my expression in a form that I am at present at this phase of my life where I am back from the journeys, pondering with a strange kind of subjective detachment.

-junuka

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