Gandhi’s children
Vishnu Vasu has created a masterpiece of a documentary film about the
plight of the real children of the Mahathma, a feat no Indian filmmaker
has been able to achieve to-date.
This documentary has come to us at a time when making even a short
film needs a huge budget, a big film crew and the latest and most
expensive audio and video equipment. ‘Gandhi’s Children’ is a creation
of one young man, who was the producer, director, script writer,
cameraman, music director, editor and narrator all in one.
Perhaps Vishnu had many advantages over his Indian filmmakers, which
helped in his success with the film. He had the luxury of spending his
childhood in a Kandian village where he was born, and of studying the
Word of the Buddha at a temple. He was also exposed to the life in Sri
Lanka and also the United States, where poverty and inequality were not
as severe as in India.
Thus he was able to see the misery in India with a fresh and open
mind, unlike the Indian filmmakers, who had been seeing all this from
their birth, and become immune to such pain and suffering the same way
these children had become immune to all the bacteria, virus and the
poison among which they grow up.
Vishnu describes the difficulties he had in making the film, his
failure to raise funds, his dependence on a few friends from U.S.A.
which enabled him to go to India, his travels by train and bus and long
walks in remote villages. All these hardships that he underwent would
have contributed to the success of the film, because he did not have to
work to a time table, to a set script and travel with a large film crew.
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A scene
from the documentary |
Such luxuries would have blunted his vision, and the “feel” for
poverty. He would not have been so readily accepted by the people we see
in the film had he travelled otherwise. They would then, have posed for
him, been self-conscious and some would even have tried to hide their
poverty and suffering, while others would have tried to exaggerate.
The film is not showing us anything new, but it reaches us because of
the way it is presented, because of the way he uses music to grip us and
make us feel the hunger, the pain and the frustration of the women and
children. The brief interviews tell us volumes about the problem of
poverty and inequality in India. Though Vishnu claims that he was a
musician once, the film tells us that once a musician, is always a
musician. In a way it is his music that has been captured in his film,
the music of pain and suffering. One more example of Synesthesia. Like
Mahagama Sekara, Vishnu is letting us see his music through his camera.
If not for the pain and the suffering and the inequality, if not for
the grief and frustration we feel because of our attachment to others,
there would not have been any creative work among man. If everyone was
happy and contented, if there was only love and kindness among all human
beings, perhaps there would not have been anything for us to write
about, to sing, to paint, to film or dream. India would not have
produced Valmiki, Mohandas Gandhi, Ravindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray
We have heard of Dr. Abdul Kalam’s vision for the year 2020. He
claimed that India is among the top five nations of the world in terms
of GDP. By 2020 India expects to double the food production. Before him
other Indian leaders had their vision. Like Jawaharlal Nehru, on 14
August 1947, in his “Tryst with Destiny”, his vision was to remove
barriers of class stratification and their far reaching effects on
inequality and deprivation in economic, political and social spheres.
Gahndhi’s Children remind us of this inequality still persisting,
amidst IPL and 2G scams and the cathartic Bollywood extravaganzas and 27
storied private mansions. in the film we meet families who eat rats,
because they have nothing else to eat, and not as a delicacy as some
others are apt to do with other creatures, which are repulsive to us.
Amartya Sen, in a Nehru Lecture in 2001 had mentioned that India had
62 million tons of food stocks, which happened to be the largest unused
food stocks in the world. The politicians and bureaucrats in power, who
are said to be servants of the people, were hoarding the food stocks, at
prices beyond the reach of the starving millions.
The film talks about the “untouchables”. But these untouchables
should be proud of their position, because in a way even the queen of
England is an “untouchable”, as we learnt after Michelle Obama placed
her hand on the queen’s back.
Incidentally I had the opportunity to watch Gandhi’s Children on the
day after the recent royal wedding, which would have been watched by
millions of Indians, while other millions were huddled in the most
unhygienic slums, dying of malnutrition and infections. The first group
would have forgotten, and the second would not have been aware that most
of the millions of pounds sterling spent on this wedding would have been
from what the British robbed from their country.
‘Gandhi’s Children’ makes us sad, brings tears to our eyes, and also
rouses our anger against the people who are responsible for the plight
of these people, and those who could but would not raise a finger to
help them. But these thoughts and feelings are with us only for a few
hours, or for a few days, when we talk about doing something about the
problem, when we talk about the plight of our own less equal women and
children in our country. We encourage the filmmaker to produce more such
films.
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