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A media activist group is showing some powerful documentaries in colleges around the city, hoping to inspire students to do more than watch and forget them
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Students at Mounts thrash out aspects of the films screened by Pedestrian Pictures — Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy
"DREAMS HAVE changed," Deepu tells me. He goes on to specify: "College dreams have changed. When I was with the student movement, that's when the privatisation of education happened. People didn't really know what it was, but students reacted because they knew it was something bad."
On the journey back from screening Baba Budangiri at Renuka College in Nelamangala, Deepu who works with Pedestrian Pictures, and Vasu, an activist with the Anti Communal Forum (an umbrella organisation comprising anti-communal groups from every district of Karnataka) analyse why the student movement in India is on the decline. Deepu suggests that college students today are more geared toward looking for jobs which pay well rather than focussing their energies on political action.
Media as messenger
Which may be why a small media activist group called Pedestrian Pictures screens documentaries at schools, colleges, and community gatherings across Karnataka (and often in other states as well) to sensitise audiences. This month and the next, Pedestrian Pictures has organised film shows around the theme of communalism, being screened in over 30 Bangalore colleges. Deepu says: "We're trying to use this medium to help the movement. We are trying to carry the voices of the people who face problems, and concretise them. We are a media connecting point between the movement and the people."
In order not to ignite audience emotions and then leave them in a vacuum, Pedestrian Pictures makes sure they take along an activist working in the area the film embraces, so that when students mouth the proverbial "But what can we do?" line, there's an activist right on hand to connect them with the ground situation.
Reaching out
At Renuka College, P.U. students groped for familiar images in a disturbing film on the Sufi shrine otherwise known as Dattatreya Baba Budan, which VHP-Bajrang Dal activists want to make a Hindu preserve (lobbying for it to become a devasthana). The shrine has involuntarily become a flashpoint of sorts, with VHP leader Pravin Togadia warning it will be "the Ayodhya of the South".
Young students watched the film attentively, reacting only at the more obvious sources of humour: saffron paint on a sadhu's face, a young boy elaborately made up as a deity. In sheer irony, the film was followed by the routine queuing up of students and faculty for Friday puja prasad.
Many questions
Slightly older students at Mount Carmel College, who watched other films, including an excerpt from Rakesh Sharma's award winning film on Gujarat, Final Solutions, were more obviously moved, shaking their heads in disbelief to the inflammatory statements by right wing rabble rousers.
Staying on to talk to the film-makers, the spectrum of their questions ranged from the tricky "So, what's the solution? Do we vote for the Left?" to questions for the film-makers themselves: "Didn't you feel angry talking to those people?" and "How did you achieve closure?"
Student activism
After the films, Shikha Tripathi, a student of films who says she wants to make films on "cultural consciousness", explains why meshing activism and film-making is a good idea. "You start by being part of a (activist) group. You make your ideas stronger, experience a movement, and then translate it into film."
Pooja Mitra, a first year student of PYEC, says: "I definitely want to find out more about the Anti Communal Forum — I don't want to just go away and forget."
HEMANGINI GUPTA
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