Dajo

Thank you all my backers for pitching in your support so soon,we're 3 % funded at Kickstarter !

I'm super excited to let you know that we just got a confirmation from a master shadow artist, Radha Kumud Sharma (fondly called Dajo by people who know him), belonging to Bolpur near Vishwabharati Santiniketan, West Bengal. Priyanka Chhabra,one of the core members of our film collective had shot a documentary with him awhile ago,and his story is humbling.

So,Dajo says he'd love to be a part of our explorations through the region.:):) And if all goes well with the funding, we'll have some super magic coming your way as soon as we get started on our recce!

Dajo, has been touring for the last 40 years through Jammu and Kashmir across Himachal to Gujarat by foot, in India teaching science and narrating stories to the school students in villages and towns across the country. He uses the play of light and his finger movements to create different animals, birds and human beings.
 
In basic science, he covers subjects such as Geography, Biology, Chemistry; some favorite topics being the solar and lunar eclipse and cell division in plants and animal. And the kids love him :)
Have a look ...

Jaya, you will absolutely love his narrative on the 'Life of Buddha', shadow art with hand cut stencils, waiting for him to come into town so we can start working with him :)

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Hello world :):)

Come,come be part of the idea.
I pitched it to these guys at Kickstarter.com in the US and they loved it.
Tag.

Project Edza for Ladakh

just taking you along my visual journey...
digging for the common thread..this will be a series..

I'm writing, and it feels like I'm onto nitro mode already :):)
thank you everybody who's jumped onto the same ship with me,it's only going to happen if these energies are fused.
looking out for more people in the water who'd like to jump on
feel free to share a thread you pick.

Below,The Namgyal Tsemo Gompa above the town of Leh, Ladakh.

Below, a lama puts on a mask before performing at the
Hemis Festival at Hemis Monastery, also called the 'Roof of the world'.


Below,A cow grazes along the shore at Pangong Lake,near Spangmik,
Ladakh.

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immersion in Ladakh soon :):)

  
Download now or listen on posterous

02 Nomads Of The Tibetian High Plateau.mp3 (8561 KB)

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how to stitch a boat

in Kerala..

sometimes your mother's point-and-shoot can make you miss the view finder.

any.all.a.

:):)

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LADAKH

We're going to Ladakh. :)
Preparations are underway..

Here's what a bunch of us animators, sculptors, textile designers, analysts and film makers plan to do about exploring Ladakh, a part of the Tibetan plateau at the northern tip of India, 3500 metres above sea level. We're talking about a place opened to the general public by the Indian Govt only as recently as 1974,and since then has been documented only by explorers as an object of fascination,an ancient future. In the process the Ladakhi people have started making strong efforts to save their craft,save their tradition from ideas of modernization, save it from well, matchbox living spaces.

So we're going in with an animator who's worked on the content and art direction of Virgin Comics dealing with Indian mythology to come in and interact with the thangka artists of Ladakh, to explore with them and understand where they come from.You can see some of his work here: Abhishek.
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We're going in with a textile designer to figure the original methods adopted by the Ladakhi people in weaving,and the unique design methods of this culture which was on one of the oldest trade routes connecting Central Asia to China centuries ago.
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We're also going to try and capture the completely oral narrative forms and music in Ladakh with a group of film makers and a sound engineer.
And we're going in with analysts to study the sustainable means the Ladakhi people adopt to survive in such climes considering their only natural source of water is glacial meltings!
More on this one in a bit!
People who've been reading this blog,might remember me talking about this part of our country earlier. Well we're going there now :)
If you're interested on staying posted on this project mail me or leave a thought in the comment box.we need all the support we can get!!!

Today I got a brown paper package tied up with string.
I must be in the only profession where one can still get these regularly:):):)
I think packages from the Indian Postal Service are the most brilliant ever,and the postmen working inside those beaten buildings are the most genuinely good tempered people.They work in a maze of shelves and cupboards surrounded by indigo blue Indian Post bags in the midst of wooden furniture so weathered,the edges were shining..sigh..
..I met a bunch of 5 really old men there,who fussed around my package and asked for all forms of identity proofs before they let me even see anything. I completely enjoyed the bullying,it sounded like my grandfather cribbing about how irresponsible everyone was getting about their belongings(I was 6 days late in collecting the pack),only there were five grandpas here.After fifteen minutes of talking,a cool drink in hand, I was given the package without any legitimate address proof whatsoever, chatting with one of them about how names of people in the south of India work..my name is milann tress john,my brother is jitin abraham john,my father is john abraham,yes he was in the Army,yes ..in the Para regiment,no I've never jumped from a plane..
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which DHL employee would you like to have a conversation like that with ,huh?:)

Just back from a visit to my design school,I'm quite done with the artists griping about that want for the outlet for expression,
you can draw? go out into the street and start that sketching for Chrissake!
you can shoot with that camera? don't think.don't waste tape. shoot exactly when inspiration strikes.nobody is watching. do something.
you can inspire people? find a platform. we need all the inspiration we can get. choose a cause. check its credibility.Be responsible about what you dispense.
Choose your medium,can everybody please start making themselves heard,please?!!

























































































































This is What I saw Today ,with Richard, he sketches in from the tube,from the street,from dinner,from all over the place..just sketching every day in..
Thank you Richard,for letting me put up your superb sketches up on my blog.

an ode to joy

How to draw a cow-II at Vellore,Tamil Nadu,India

It gives me great pleasure to begin the written documentation of this trip through the western coast of India from Vellore, Tamil Nadu.

For many days over the last 3 years I’d been sitting by the side of a road drinking chai at film school wondering when I’d finally know enough to set out and capture exactly these people, these stories of India and make them seen to the people who’ve forgotten how to see .That day is here. I have 52 tapes of adopted footage.The edit is on..

A group of young Americans and Indian students (Yale graduates,climate change analysts,university students),a solar powered band(the members of the band are nuclear physicists, film makers, lawyers,conservationists), a Czechoslovakian(film maker,conservationist) entered the school premises where the little children happened to be starting their day singing a nursery rhyme, ‘Frère Jacques’ (or ‘Are you sleeping,brother John’ in French). Little Tamilian children singing French somewhere in the middle of nowhere..

The founder,Ramu Manivannan talks about why he set up this school for the rural kids of interior Tamil Nadu, he talks about Gandhi..
(for those who disagree with Gandhi,...he inspires a lot of people,as I proceed with my writing,I'll show you how...he's turning out to be the role model for people who take things in their own hands and help themselves..more on this later.)…

Manivannan talks about how you can’t get anywhere if you don’t learn first
how to take care of yourself, your land, your soil,.
unless you know how to mend your own clothes,
unless you know how to plant that tree you study about,
unless you know how to put bricks together and build a wall..
they're called life skills..
You haven’t learn anything unless you couple all of this with learning language ,geography, science, math.






























































(that's Solar Punch up there,our band preparing to sing with the kids)
'it's about integrating mainstream curriculum with life skills like farming,weaving and natural building,about non violent conflict resolution,about the energy and teachings of different traditions being a part of the learning...',says Ramu.
They have built their own buildings in this school, they make their own food grown in their fields, they teach these,the children of farmers, organic farming,they have their own vegetable patches. The kids learn while the adults unlearn.

200 years ago, the villagers of the area cut down the tropical forests down to chase the tigers away. Today they’re growing it back inch by inch. The tigers must come back.

This is Matthew from England,who's been working here since last year with his friends.This year he got down more friends they're doing a natural building workshop with 10-12 students from all over the world so they'll get started building a kitchen for the kids with biogas in mind,he's getting into rain water harvesting,organic farming and growing a food forest(a forest that mimics natural forests but supplies food and material for living).
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I’m attaching pics of them…the videos will follow when I have clearance.
watch this space.

bonobos

I thought while i'm talking of far flung things I might as well share some far flung reading...take time out to read Ian Parker's article in the New Yorker here...
It's about the Bonobo. It's one of the 4 great apes along with the orangutan,chimpanzee and gorilla...only the least researched...can you believe the species were given their name only in 1954?! And the researchers couldn't work in the field till 1972 because of the war in Congo!

Here are some excerpts from Ian's visit to Congo...this guy can get really funny at times,I wish all my school readers were written like this..(!)..

"Live bonobos had already been seen outside Congo, but they, too, had been misidentified as chimps. At the turn of the century, the Antwerp zoo held at least one. Robert Yerkes, a founder of modern primatology, briefly owned a bonobo. In 1923, he bought two young apes, and called one Chim and the other Panzee. In “Almost Human,” published two years later, he noted that they looked and behaved quite differently. Panzee was timid, dumb, and foul-tempered. “Her resentment and anger were readily aroused and she was quick to give them expression with hands and teeth,” Yerkes wrote. Chim was a joy: equable and eager for new experiences. “Seldom daunted, he treated the mysteries of life as philosophically as any man.” Moreover, he was a “genius.” Yerkes’s description, coupled with later study of Chim’s remains, made it plain that he was Pan paniscus: bonobos had a good reputation even before they had a name. (Panzee was a chimpanzee; but, in defense of that species, her peevishness was probably connected to a tuberculosis infection.) Chim died in 1924, before his species was recognized.

For decades, “pygmy chimpanzee” remained the common term for these apes, even after “bonobo” was first proposed, in a 1954 paper by Eduard Tratz, an Austrian zoologist, and Heinz Heck, the director of the Munich zoo. (They suggested, incorrectly, that “bonobo” was an indigenous word; they may have been led astray by Bolobo, a town on the south bank of the Congo River. In the area where Hohmann works, the species is called edza.) In the thirties, that zoo had three members of Pan paniscus, and Heck and Tratz had studied them. By the time their paper, the first based on detailed observations of bonobo behavior, was published, the specimens were dead, allegedly killed by stress during Allied air raids. (The deaths have been cited as evidence of a bonobo’s innate sensitivity; the zoo’s brute chimpanzees survived.) As Frans de Waal has noted, Heck and Tratz’s pioneering insights—they wrote that bonobos were less violent than chimps, for example—did not become general scientific knowledge, and had to be rediscovered."

"......When a researcher has access to a species about which little is known, and whose every gesture seems to echo a human gesture, and whose eyes meet a human gaze, there is a temptation simply to stare, until you have seen enough to tell a story. That is how Hohmann judged the work of Dian Fossey, who made long-term observations of gorillas in Rwanda, and the work of Jane Goodall, at least at the start of her career. “They lived with the apes and for the apes,” he said. “It was ‘Let’s see what I’m going to get. I enjoy it anyway, so whatever I get is fine.’ ” And this is how Hohmann regarded the Japanese researchers, for all their perseverance. The Wamba site had produced a lot of data on social and sexual relations, and Kano published a book about bonobos, which concluded with the suggestion that bonobos illuminated the evolution of human love. But “what the Japanese produced was not really satisfying,” Hohmann said. “It was narrative and descriptive. They are not setting out with a question. They want to understand bonobos.” Moreover, the Japanese initially lured bonobos with food, as Goodall had lured chimpanzees. This was more than habituation. At Wamba, bonobos ate sugarcane at a field planted for them. The primatological term is “provisioning”; Hohmann calls it opening a restaurant. (As an example of the possibly distorting impact of provisioning, Hohmann noted that the Wamba females had far shorter intervals between births than those at Lomako.)..."....

...while we're here you might want to look up Frans Lanting's(Nat Geo ace photographer) coverage of the Evolution of Life through his photographs here..:), the picture above of the elusive Bonobo is also his...
I now have a new thing to add to my wish list :) : I must hang around bonobos in Congo for awhile.

How to draw a cow

I've decided to start a process of sharing some of the insanely brilliant insights of the purest citizens of India,the people in the lands far flung,in the middle of nowhere, I came across as I work,something more useful I figured than just sharing my views on the degeneration of IQs in the cities.

I've been working with a bunch of people[the Indian Youth Climate Network(IYCN) to be precise] who went on the road from Chennai to Delhi through villages and small cities in 3 battery charged vehicles,one vegetable oil fuelled buggy and a solar panelled truck recording people's initiatives to battle climate change.
You would be surprised by the absolutely contagious spirit of the super positive people empowering themselves all over the country...from killing their usage of LPG completely,to fully solar electrified establishments,to devicing methods to make their water potable without waiting for any govt to move it's freaking ass!

To give you some context,after Indira Gandhi's great Green Revolution (which you must remember from your geography books)which piled our fields with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the 'green' revolution left the soil completely infertile(just that what we never read about it)...just like a drug abused body which needs rehab quite desperately.
Some people have started the healing process and it has been my pleasure to document the 50 odd hours of footage shot on the road!We don't hear about these people,have you realised? Just like we don't hear about the entire continent of Africa ever in the news till they play cricket there!

I actually woke up to the 72% of our population who have no faces,no voices in our media because of this road trip.

Now,for the people who're still wondering about who funds this kind of a tour in the first place,could I please announce that the air around you is changing because of global warming. Some people are waking up to it and doing something about it,while others who still think it's a cause meant for those activists on the streets are probably going to be in for a rude shock when this recession really kicks in. And well if you're part of the urban ghetto and can't get yourself out of bed and don't feel energised to do quite anything,here's a cause to puzzle over if you're quite done with figuring the meaning of life.

I intend to document the solutions found on this road trip gradually on this blog for those interested in reading more,but let's start with us,the urbane who are just not helping,starting with the Nano.
When I heard about the TATA Nano coming out in the numbers it was claiming to come out in,I felt completely helpless. Here, we were trying to push zero carbon or battery operated cars,and while our budding automobile designers in an Eames' NID were still busy building fuel guzzling hot rods for their chance to go abroad on an exchange program,Ratan Tata was releasing a bunch of cockroaches called Nanos on the streets to increase the average individual's carbon footprint.
so now we'll have more cars on our superb roads
more people letting go of riding buses or trains because they now have cars
more cars bought per household
more petrol being used
more petrol needing to be shipped in
..this list just won't end.

anyway, a couple of days after this thought,I heard about someone already putting a plan into place with a super vision,
this is Shai Agassi,talking on TED....have a look



















and this is where you can see instantly how this guy has made govts go for change!

aliens in my pudding

national anathema


yesterday i went to a multiplex.to see the fast and the furious.
the national anthem was played.
i was on a phone call outside.
i came in to find 6 indians on top of my friend from the abroad.
he speaks very little english.
so he spoke.
and they screamed.
they were screaming because he sat down 5 seconds before the anthem finished.
they yelled, " We have let you into this country!"
what lovely nationalism.
their almost 60 year old father yelled with them.screamed of people disrespecting his age.
in the intermission a young lawyer from the group came forward and with a sickly sweet smile asked only for an apology.
apologise to whom, for what country?

i stand for national anthems.I wait for a film's credits to roll completely.i don't correct american spelling.
god made ten commandments.
we still kill.
we still steal.
we still sleep with our neighbor's wives.

which law?
which canon?
which country?
which colour of skin is everyone yelling about?

the guy with me by the end was so sure they would never get the point,he was ready to maybe apologise for the arising of such a situation.
he told me to stand behind him because he thought these indians would jump me next for defending him.those indians.

must we apologise for created situations now?to ensure peace?
will we still nurture extremists amongst us?
the mob loves to rant.i stand. i know my brother stands.
but that's all i'm sure of anymore.
i know we both stand.
well,that's a number,I guess.
two.

credit roll

for jitin for towering over me,ready to rap me on the knuckles if my cloud wandered too far out of sight
for jitin who made the cloud break out into rain
for isacco who reminded me what it felt like to take my socks off and feel the grass
for ankur who threw shoes at my cloud and made me laugh with him
for swaati for making me run into the sea
for divya who has always dug into the earth to make space for me to breathe
for priyanka who breaks out of her path every time unquestioningly to wander with me
for tanushri for clutching her life energies in her fist and holding it out to me on call
for tanushri for keeping dinner for me in case I did come in late
for unnati for making my worries hers
for arpit's wooden toy
for karthik for pushing me where it hurts and kicking my very best out
for akash who jumped onto the wagon and laughed with delight at the canvases i spread out.we were no strangers after all.
for amitabh for everything and for nothing
for sibi for leading an intrusion into an embrace
for harsha for keeping check on the good vibrations
for anupam for volunteering services from a hospital bed
for angshuman,because we're young and wild and free and still enjoying the search.

and then,with a quick hoist,I shot out into the sky after 72 hours of a shoot
:)

Shawn Barber.
a mix of illustration in oil which just knocked my breath away.fanTastic movement in the frames!there's a delicate focus on the realism that doesn't topple us into a medical study of anatomy.so goddamn inspiring!!!

This would be Davy Graham,I'd been following him on the podcast,got a hold of a clip which breathes of all that music I loved,love.
If you see what you like,'angi' is up on the podcast.

bees

this is a page from the pictorial autobiography of a man called bharath murthy,a friend led me on to his superb logging technique.
this thing he mentions about bees is what got me in splits...
see,I come from this Syrian Catholic Indian family.We say the rosary every day.
At the end of the rosary we join our hands and go to all the elders of the family in birth order and say 'Praise be to Jesus Christ'..
when I was a child,I spent 5 years saying 'Praise bees to Jesus Christ'.
I was always mystified by the bees part.too.

the green,the striped and those in between

Log 2:


I hate that India's map still looks like this every other corner I turn .
I wonder about the absolute idiots huffing about making these lines.
I wonder how people living there feel about their non existence or existence from map to map.
First we get someone from across oceans to draw b*#@y lines for us.Then we argue about how he was an idiot and huff about what we think of the people beyond that line.
What a tamasha.

Observe the map we,Indians believe to be India.
how many people live in the green and the striped?
Do they have pets?
Should I shrug and continue vegetating?

6th of 6th

Doing as I'm told Tanu,

the rules:
1. pick the 6th picture from your 6th photos folder
2. tell the story around it
3. pass it on to 6 people



the tale:
cold,winter 2007.I was living vicariously,helpless before this cycle that goes every 2 years through my life..
in other words,my time to TOX had arrived and I was doing the time justice! lol...
I spoke to maybe 3 people over the three months of the spin
stayed holed in rooms
did not sleep
did not eat
and blacked out happily :):):)


my people:
divya
arpit
jitin
anupam
ankur
swaati

mail me your posts if you don't have a blog.i'm interested in the photographs!!