The Times in India
The last weekend was a very memorable one; I attended my first film festival. I was only used to reading about such things in newspapers during my 22 years in Vizag and two years in Lucknow. It was a festival called Yesterday, which was a collection of twelve films by great masters of the yesteryears.
Each auteur through his oeuvre depicted the life and times of a particular cross section of Indian society at particular time in the context of the existing social, economic and political atmosphere. M S Sathyu’s Garam Hawa was a film made in 1972 about the effects of partition. Balraj Sahni ‘s performance as a patriarch who doesn’t want to take his family to Pakistan is one of the best I have seen across Indian and world cinema. Satyajit Ray’s Devi captured conflict between religious orthodoxy and modernism in late nineteenth century Bengal. Others such as Ritwik Ghatak, Saeed Mirza, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and John Abraham also made movies that captured on screen for posterity the spirit of a particular era.
Movies like these are made for posterity. May be 50 years from now the Suprabhatam that usually plays in the background along with sunrise might become extinct in real life and our grandchildren would hear it only in the movies and not in their neighbourhood.
The question that I ask myself after the festival is “ What is the leitmotif of our times, and of our lives”. The spirit of the times is manifested through individual actions and choices. If I were to make a movie about the zeitgeist of life in India circa 2004 what it would be about. What is the dominating current, the tour de force in the lives of youngsters who constitute a majority of the population? Half a decade from now what would be the events which would be viewed as having shaped our entire generation. People would say it is different for different socio – economic strata, but still there would be one dominant theme or one dominant stratum whose needs, wants and lives have changed drastically from the past.
What is the zeitgeist of our times?
Each auteur through his oeuvre depicted the life and times of a particular cross section of Indian society at particular time in the context of the existing social, economic and political atmosphere. M S Sathyu’s Garam Hawa was a film made in 1972 about the effects of partition. Balraj Sahni ‘s performance as a patriarch who doesn’t want to take his family to Pakistan is one of the best I have seen across Indian and world cinema. Satyajit Ray’s Devi captured conflict between religious orthodoxy and modernism in late nineteenth century Bengal. Others such as Ritwik Ghatak, Saeed Mirza, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and John Abraham also made movies that captured on screen for posterity the spirit of a particular era.
Movies like these are made for posterity. May be 50 years from now the Suprabhatam that usually plays in the background along with sunrise might become extinct in real life and our grandchildren would hear it only in the movies and not in their neighbourhood.
The question that I ask myself after the festival is “ What is the leitmotif of our times, and of our lives”. The spirit of the times is manifested through individual actions and choices. If I were to make a movie about the zeitgeist of life in India circa 2004 what it would be about. What is the dominating current, the tour de force in the lives of youngsters who constitute a majority of the population? Half a decade from now what would be the events which would be viewed as having shaped our entire generation. People would say it is different for different socio – economic strata, but still there would be one dominant theme or one dominant stratum whose needs, wants and lives have changed drastically from the past.
What is the zeitgeist of our times?
Labels: Notes
posted by Tony @ 2:23 PM
2 Comments:
At 9:53 AM ,
Anonymous said...
good one......
sarvadamana
At 3:16 PM ,
Tony said...
thx...but an answer to the last line would be very welcome
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