I nearly did not go for the second film either... because I was running terribly late and would have missed the first half. I went anyway, and I'm glad I did.
The film was 'Menstrual Man'- about Arunachalam Muruganantham from Coimbatore, an extraordinary man who built a low cost machine to make low cost sanitary pads for poor women in rural and semi urban areas. His story is as bizarre as it is inspiring. The lengths to which he went, procuring used napkins from college students and wearing a pad himself with goats blood periodically seeping into it, in order to understand what the experienceis like for a woman...and getting ostracised by family and friends for his weird behaviour, is hard to even imagine. What kind of drive and dedication does it take for someone to do that... he is such a superstar!
His amazingness doesn't end here. He has worked hard to make a self sustaining model, so that women everywhere can be empowered, with little or no back up support from him. This objective informed decisions about the design of the machine- to keep it as simple as possible, so that no servicing is required, and to keep it manual, for the same reason. Besides it makes little sense to make an electrical machine in a country where electric supply is erratic and insufficient, especially in the rural areas.
He also takes into account the difference in the nature of men and women... by empowering women he realises, you contribute to better living conditions for the whole family, not necessarily the case with men who often spend away the money on alcohol or drugs or gambling or other such vices. There's a remarkable insight and sensitivity in the way he has designed and detailed both the machine and the business model. And through it all he has stayed remarkably humble, when he could easily have gotten lured by big money.
One of the most fantastic qualities he possesses is his sense of humour. Every once in a while the audience would crack up with laughter at one of his jokes. Another quality I found fascinating is his intelligence and clear thinking. Sample this: If I was educated, I would have given up. My advantage was that I wasn't, so I kept going. Or his explanation to a bunch of foreigners in London that they only understand the language of dollars, but in the village women would trade napkins for rice- a modern day barter system that would never satisfy the requirements of a western economic model.
The film was ordinary, but did its job reasonably well. The man of course is a superstar!
Also check out his TED talk:
Post screening I returned home with a friend and his friend who turned out to be a midwife! I have heard of her before (we have friends in common) but nobody had ever mentioned what she did! I was fascinated. India always had a rich tradition of midwifery, but lately, with all our aping of the west, we seem to have all but forgotten it. The assumption of course is that the delivery is normal and natural, and I suppose it doesn't get more natural than this. All midwives by law are required to be tied to a doctor as well in case of an emergency, which is exactly how it should be and has always been. Anyway, I was thrilled to meet her. She has trained in the US and practises both there and here in Bombay.
I told her about this incident many years back when I had mentioned to a friend that if I ever have a child I would like to have it with a midwife, and she had balked. I'm sure if she met Jumana, with her reassuring presence and ready smile, and heard of her 100+ deliveries, she would feel inclined to change her mind...
I nearly didn’t
go for the fist one. I really wanted to see it of course, but I really wanted
to see it on the big screen,
the way films are supposed to be seen. ‘Gopi gawaiyaa, Bagha bajaiyaa’ is a
CFSI produced animation film based on the short story ‘Gopi gyne, Bagha byne’
by Upendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury. One look at the trailer will give you a sense
of the canvas of the film- it has been designed to be a film for the theatre,
not the small screen of television. Much work would have gone in the sound as
well, and I was really not looking forward to seeing it at Vikalp @ Prithvi, at
Prithvi House- those are hardly ideal conditions for film viewing.
But then I wasn’t
sure when the next opportunity to see the film would present itself, and so I
went...
Even though I
must state at the very outset that there is little that I know about animation,
so I can’t talk knowledgably about it, it was the animation that struck a
chord. It’s a beautifully detailed film- exquisite, like some of our folk
forms. The first thing, and the last, and throughout in between, that hits you
is the colour and the detail. While things have been kept simple, a lot seems
to have gone into designing it in a way that maximum possible communication is
made possible by efficient production. A rich multicoloured palate is used
throughout- every frame is a feast (some have too much going on- there were
places I thought the background plates were almost distracting). And the
textures, oh my! Things come alive because of her use of textures…
She seemed to
have been inspired by shadow puppetry- especially in how she conceived the
ghost, and the way facial features moved within the face of the evil Senapati, with overall movement,
in a rocking motion almost- I had thought while seeing the film. In the
interaction afterwards she mentioned that this was indeed true, and had
informed everything from the animation, especially the movements, to how the
various characters shaped up. While on the subject of characters- I was most
fascinated by the noses! She said the film had about 80 characters- so many
varieties of noses! And I was fascinated by the stitches everywhere on the faces and bodies, like they were cloth dolls stitched into shape.
The other thing
noteworthy about the film is another subject I know little about- the music.
It’s a musical, so from the first scene to the last, there is
such-lovely-music.
Somewhere in the
middle of the film however, a note of disapproval crept into my mind- when the
boys started fighting over the girl. It was disservice enough to women to not
have a single noteworthy female character in a film directed by a woman, though
in a story that perhaps didn’t allow for it, it can, I suppose, be overlooked.
But what explanation do we have for perpetuating the idea of boys fighting over
a girl they haven’t even seen, forget interacted with. It made me shake my
head, and want to shake a finger at Soumitra for having written it that way,
and for Shilpa for having directed it…
Otherwise, it was
mostly a lovely experience. See the trailer and judge for yourself.
