[Reader-list] Aaj ke Naam - In Today's Name

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear  All at readers List,

(Please feel free to copy relevant parts and redistribute this message)

I am forwarding news of an initiative started by independent filmmakers called 
'Aaj ke Naam' (In Today's Name), which intends to respond to the growing 
fascism in India through short films/ video. The initiative is voluntary. There 
is a discussion list which is hosted by Sarai for those who would like to be 
involved in furthering and supporting this effort. Please find below, an 
announcement from the list adminsitrators - Yousuf Sayeed and Rahul Roy about 
this initiative, and also, a background text that spells out the ideas behind 
the initiative.
More info on Aaj ke Naam is available at - <http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/
listinfo/aaj-ke-naam>

Rahul Roy's e mail address is - <aakar at del3.vsnl.net.in>
Yousuf Sayeed's e mail address is - <ysaeed7 at yahoo.com>

Hope that this will be of interest to many on this list, and we would like to 
welcome, Aaj ke Naam, which is begining to become active, on to the network of 
discussion lists at Sarai.

regards

Shuddha
--------------------------------
ANNOUNCEMENT OF AAJ KE NAAM
Dear Friends,

Some of us got together recently in Delhi to discuss the possibility of 
responding to the current communal situation in the country as a community of 
film makers. In the meeting we decided to produce a body of work which would 
represent our protest/statement/comment on the times we are living in. We do 
not have the means to support these productions but we are hoping that each one 
of us will be able to generate resources and assistance to make these 
productions possible. We hope to put these productions together as a package 
which can then be screened all over the country. A detailed statement 
(background text) is enclosed in the body of the message below.

We would like to request all those connected with film making to offer their 
services/expertise/equipment to make it possible for these productions to take 
place. If you can let us know how you can contribute towards the production we 
will try and put you in touch with those in your cities who have agreed to make 
a video/film.

We are specially interested in statements by new film makers and we will try to 
introduce them to camerapersons, sound recordists, editors who are associated 
with the project.

Kindly respond at the earliest possible. We have started an egroup called Aaj 
ke Naam through which we can interact and share our thoughts. 

The mails for this group can be sent to 
<mailto:W aaj-ke-naam at mail.sarai.net>aaj-ke-naam at mail.sarai.net , 

and the archives/other information about the same can be had from the following 
site: <http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/aaj-ke-naam>. 

Others from film/media background could also become members of this egroup by 
registering at the above site, or requesting us for the same.

In Solidarity,

Rahul Roy/Yousuf Saeed
List Moderators

_________________________________
Background Text : AAJ  KE NAAM

In a few weeks, it will almost be two months since the killings began in 
Gujarat. We have seen the images on television, not only of the violence, but 
also of the ways in which those who orchestrated it were feted and honoured. As 
people who work with images, as documentary filmmakers, we feel an urgent need 
to address this reality, so that these images of helpless victims and arrogant 
engineers of massacres are not the only ones we will have available to us to 
remember and understand a dark time. We also feel that as a community, we - 
documentary filmmakers and all those who work with images. will have failed in 
our responsibilities if we do not respond to what has happened. This is why we 
are writing to you all, as fellow filmmakers to make a series of interventions 
that can begin to address what we have all witnessed in the last weeks and 
days.

What have we witnessed? Once again, like in Delhi in 1984, in Meerut in 1987 
and at other places in other times, we have seen how a state machinery has 
blatantly demonstrated that it is willing to organize and implement a pogrom. 
We have also witnessed a near paralysis of our imagination, as we clutch at 
ways of being able to articulate our sadness and our anger at how the fabric of 
our social life, of everyday relations, of the few things that redeemed our 
cities, have been torn by the forces that command the state today and by their 
agents in society. 

If it was Gujarat yesterday, it (the violence that begins in the mind and in 
the imagination) is everywhere today, in the arrogance with which people say 
"serves them right" in ordinary tea shops and in elite dinner parties, or in 
the seriousness, and the ease with which people express the sentiment that "we 
need to arm ourselves for a civil war, fought to the finish" on internet chat 
rooms, and in crowded buses. If such a thing happens in our society, in these 
times, Lebanon, Yugoslavia and Rwanda will seem picnics by comparions.

For many of us, this has resulted in our being unable to speak, being unable to 
react by any means other than being present at an occasional demonstration, or 
by signing a petition. This has left our anger, our 
despair, un-thought, un-adressed and un-accounted for. We live as if we had 
already begun counting our time, as strangers, unsure of when the next wave of 
orchestrated madness will occur and where it will occur. And, even if it does 
not occur, we have seen the spaces of conversation, of discourse, steadily 
being taken over by fascists and their epigones, or by those who would like to 
make capital out of the suffering that arose from the violence. 

We have witnessed the cynical politics that makes political parties prepare 
themselves for elections in the wake of massacres. We have seen them gloat in 
the assurance that violence will reap them the rewards they seek. We have seen 
them justify this violence in a language that would make a Goebbels feel proud 
of them. They have told their thousand lies.

How do we address this time? How do we address its silences, its hate speech, 
its evasions and its apologies? How do we speak without garbled and tired 
cliches about communal amity (as if a davp style "hindu-muslim-sikh-isai, hum 
sab hain bhai bhai" poster, or slogan can do justice to the enormity of what 
has happened), without having to defend a moribund state, its tokenism which 
paved the way for full-on communalization, and its always pathetic treatment of 
people who it decided were not part of the "mainstream", or without resorting 
to a demonization of any community and their history? 

How do we meaningfully break the silence about Gujarat? And how can we think 
about it, not as an aberration (because then it would be easy to forget and 
forgive the perpetrators - as abnormal and inhuman people who are not like you 
or me) but as a slow poisoning of our imaginations and of all our minds with 
images of some people as "greater than"or "less than" human beings. The media, 
our intelligentsia, our artists, everyone is implicated in this 
process.

How do we account for the greed, the complete erasure of the humanity of other 
people, and the inability to think in anything other than a communal or 
nationalist binary mode that besets so much of our contemporary culture, and 
especially our popular culture, our films and our television.

Surely, this process has a history that we had begun to be comfortable with, 
way before the killings in Gujarat happenned. Surely, even Hindutva and the 
politics of hatred has a pre-history in the way in which people were addressed 
in terms of their identities even within what is called secular nationalism. 
Perhaps it is about time that we started asking some uncomfortable questions 
about how we got to where we have today.

We are documentary filmmakers, we live and work with the raw materials of the 
realities, hopes, anxieties and dreams of the lives of ordinary people. We have 
seen things that others theorize about, or report, or convert into political 
manifestoes. Sometimes we hesitate to say things, not because we dont want to 
say them, but because we know that the realities that they attempt to describe 
are very complicated, and not reducible to easy, newsy television bytes. 

Some of us met in Delhi, one afternoon in March, when Rahul Roy and Saba Dewan 
called us to consider what we can do together with our craft and our skills in 
the wake of the killings in Gujarat. They wrote, - "...Can we dream of film 
makers from all parts of the country lodging their protests with videos on the 
communal situation which are then shown together as a body of work? Can we do 
it, or rather shouldn't we do it? "

We decided that the time had come for us to challenge our own silence, our own 
awkward hesitations and our own confusions, despair and anger about what we 
know is happening around us.

This letter emerges from that decision. 

We have decided to make a collection of short films/videos that articulate what 
we are thinking and feeling, some of which we have tried to summarize above. 
These are not films for a cause, because there is no cause to uphold. We are 
tired of causes that make people into the objects of political projects that 
are always larger than the reality of peoples lives. We are tired of the 
rhetoric of communities, nations, states and all things that claim our 
loyalties. We want to speak of and to the concreteness of particular 
experiences, our experiences and yours and the experience of those who have 
suffered and witnessed suffering. We make no larger claims. These are not films 
that say "This is what needs to be done", because we are not sure about "what 
needs to be done". We may have our own differences, but we are agreed on the 
fact that the time for people to be told that "this, or that, needs to be done" 
has long gone.

These are not films we are making because someone has commissioned us to make 
them, because no one has and no one will. These are films that promise nothing 
to their makers other than a means to engage with their times. They are not 
funded, they will not be sold, but we hope to energize a network of peoples 
organizations, social movements, groups, and even small affinity groups of 
individuals to show and distribute them. They will be made available as VHS 
tapes, and will be works available for fair use (for non 
commercial, educational, consciouness raising, discussion related purposes) 
within the public domain 

We have decided to call this collection - "Aaj Ke Naam", (In Today's Name) 
taken from the title of a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, which talks about the 
difficulty of living through dark times. We felt that talking about today is 
necessary and difficult at the same time. 

We are certain about the fact that we have anger, remorse and regret, and that 
we want to step back and think with our images about what we are feeling. We 
invite you to join us in this, to contribute films/videos, as short as you want 
them to be. As poster-films, as music videos, as experimental videos, as still 
images with soundtracks, as animations, as computer generated shorts, as simple 
video sketches and scratches - as anything that makes sense to you, and that 
you feel can give expression to what you are thinking. This is not an 
invitation to make the definitive, finished piece of work, rather it is a call 
to respond, spontaneously and creatively, with all and any creative means 
available at your disposal as a filmmaker or as a person who works with moving 
images and sounds.

If you are a technician, ( a cameraperson, a sound recordist, an editor, a 
writer, a graphic artist) and would not like to make a film yourself, or feel 
that you could contribute better as a technician, then you can let us know and 
we can make your offer known to those who get involved or interested in this 
project.

The deadline for submission for the first cycle of films is 30 August, 2002. Do 
let us know what you think of these ideas, and whether and how you would be 
interested in joining in or helping out in any way.

In solidarity

M.K. Srinivasan,  Rahul Roy, Raqs Media Collective, Saba Dewan, Sabina 
Gadihoke, Sanjay Kak, Shriprakash, Yousuf Sayed. 

-- 
Shuddhabrata Sengupta
SARAI:The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110 054
India
Phone : (00 91 11) 3960040