Passing by

The drum roll on the tin plates draws everybody's attention.
They all knew but turn their heads to look.
Minimal entertainment in a local train.
The little filthy girl starts to dances.
She wears a rusted iron loop from her left and drags it through her down to her feet.
Her spins her hips like a well trained dolphin.
There is pause in beat while the girl's mother scratches herself.
A tiny pause in air
The girl is trained. She continues her mute dance
The woman adjusts her sari and continues to drum roll.
The pause continues
Her sari has mud crumbs at the end and tiny mirrors all over.

The train approaches a station gingerly.
Doubting its own decision.
When it brakes, people want to get out and people want to get in
Going elbows rub rough against coming elbows.
Tiny arguments in the fraction of a second
A hand is stuck in somebody's armpit.
A human howl echoes in the chaos and the train starts.

The collection game begins
The girl moves from one carriage to another
Her arm extended, only to go to her mouth and stomach indication hunger
Some break their conversations to tell her to go
Some lift their butts high enough to pull out some change
She finishes her rounds.

Wait for the next batch.
Keep dancing to the drum beat. 

New Knowledge

Here are some of the points I have learnt from a Professor cum Director I have met at Tech Mahindra college on Saturday

1. A shot is not the time frame between a camera's operation. It is a projected series of images having a finite time and space.
2. A play and a film differs in two aspects. Viewers of a play have a physical sense of a play's surroundings and environment. In a film, the viewers are made to imagine it. I forgot the second aspect. Hopefully, I will remember it later.
3. Any film that has a cut in between becomes a fictional narrative since real life does not have cuts.
4. Read a lot. Understanding Marxism helped him with his films. Watching films is only 10 percent of the work.
5. Forget all this and understand how to make films first. The personal style will grow later. Film making is an craft than art. No matter how small the video, learn to make it good.   

THe Old Go and the New Don't Show Up

In the anime series 'Code Geass', one of the main characters, Lelouch, moves the king piece along with the others, instead of keeping him in the sidelines while his subordinates scheme and kill each other. "If the king does not lead, who else will," he would say. A valid idea, although no body in the 3-dimensional world follows it.
Taking Tollywood as an example, and also assuming that the person with the big bucks and big connections is the king/queen, they are usually last ones to lead a change. The so-called four powerful families of our Telugu industry lie in silence while the rest of the world is keen reaching out to new visual methods of storytelling and also new stories to tell.
But for obvious reasons, the reasons for disappointment are obvious. Fine, you are rich, you have grown tall and strong and now can not afford to get hacked down because they are too many people dependent on you. Or maybe, rich people are just plain lazy.
But what happened to the so-called beacons of future Telugu cinema. Not just the directors but also the artistes.

... to be continued