freshers return - colours:black - vikalp and the arts and crafts - 'dastak'

since the net is still not working at home and the mtnl guys have still not come to fix my new dsl connection, i am forced to write this in college in between classes and meetings. paul thankfully gave the school a holiday on monday, so i was at home vegetating, and in the evening went over to mukuls house for some chicken. school began on tuesday with the usual hectic schedule. its crazy the number of things that are going on simultaneously. amit has put together the office as well and now we can actually work in it from 3 pm onwards.

tuesday amit, mayuri and me along with our clients went stone shopping in parle. in the evening a freshers’ return party where i was (as usual) the oldest person around- ‘rock bottom’ at the raimee international hotel in juhu.. a dark basement with mirrorwork curtains and terrible house music. had a margarita for whopping 400 bucks, hopped around a little and left.

yesterday mamta came to college for an encounter. she showed he child abuse film- colors – black’ and her multimedia work. she also showed the iraq stall that we had worked on together for the world social forum. afterwards we went out for lunch to the fancy bengali food place at andheri- ‘oh, calcutta.’

in the evening mukul and me went to the vikalp screenings. the audience has gotten minuscule nowadays and there were hardly 10 people to watch the two films of the day. it really is about the place- bhupesh gupta bhavan in prabhadevi is ridiculously inaccessible even by train and by car there is no parking anywhere. besides which the room where screenings are held is also crappy. hopefully we might be able to host parallel screenings in the institute if things work out. the movies yesterday were both on traditional crafts of the country and their relationships with society- where they emerge from and what role to they take as commodities in our economy. ‘in you pause.. in a museum of craft’ revolved around the indian crafts museum in delhi- correas exoticizing building that cute-ifies all the artifacts in it. the second was a film about madhubani paintings and the women and men who are involved in creating them. not bad- but too long.

also one morning i saw ‘dastak’; this old black and white film where snajeev kumar and rehana sultan play a rural muslim couple who come to bombay where sanjeev kumar gets a job in the corporation. the house that they move into once belonged to a prostitute, and her customers keep coming to it asking for her, finding the innocent rehana sultan instead. the movie traced the gradual disintegration of morality and innocence due to urban life in both the characters. the end was a bit of a cop out, but the movie was actually quite amazing otherwise. and the music was sublime.