The craft of capturing motion

From the last few weeks I have had this urge to experiment with motion and create short stories through moving frames. At the end of the day, the urge is always to tell a story, the only difference here is the medium.

Perhaps it is all those hours I spent watching other people's videos, that I felt a bit inspired to try my own hand at it.

Of course, I have nothing to call equipment really. So all my shots are captured by a phone camera, with me manually zooming in and out and focussing. I think this is the most basic form of what is called as guerrilla shooting/film making style. 

I don't have any control over my subject either, so everything depends on the way I edit the shots once I have captured a few footages.

The very first attempt was a trailer of our recent trip to Puglia region in Italy this Easter, but this was greatly aided by iMovies software. (link here, if you want to check it out :)

The one below is my very first movie. It is only about a minute long, but I wanted to capture the liveliness of the Peterborough city centre. 

Peterborough being an underdog of a city, always fascinates me, and for a while I have been meaning to find a way to tell it's story. Let me know what you think of the one below.

I was also very surprised, that I enjoyed the process of editing even more than the filming. The whole process of taking lots and lots of random shots and being able to stitch a few of them together in a certain fashion, such that a story evolves from it, is possibly the essence of motion picture creation for me.

(still from the movie)

I really hope this will not be yet another seasonal interest for me, and that I dedicate time and effort in learning this craft.

Great expectations, an interpretation

Friends and family mean a lot to me.

But sometimes I take myself too seriously. And it does not help that I also have a big and bloated ego. A combination, that at times, works against my relationship with the same set of people, who I hold so dear.

The last time I had high fever, I had come up with some complex algorithm to measure and control/manage a person's expectation. Somehow I had made the connection between high expectation and a false sense of self which leads to distorted reality and a life where you are afraid to look into the mirror.

The question that stayed with me however was, is the conscious part of my brain even remotely aware of the difference between the real and the image of myself?

(I call these my high-fever-rmoments, and in general the next morning I can never quite make sense of the same thoughts, which the night before had felt like life changing epiphanies.)

In any case, the reason I wrote this long winding introduction to my manic behaviour, was not to bring to notice my Freudian slip while renaming my blog to 'Life is an iceberg' (refer to Freud's Iceberg theory of Id, ego and super-ego), but really to make an attempt to describe my trip to Kolkata and Sundarbans in February this year.

At this point, I must warn those who are after a chic travel story, that this is not. This is a post about what the trip was meant to be in my head, and what it really was.

For the longest time, I have been a person without a home. And absolutely no sense of belonging. For those who know me, you will know that when asked where I am from, I go through the most uncomfortable few minutes trying to come up with something that would make sense, is witty, remotely true, but nothing simple and straight-forward. I have even tried rehearsing an answer for these kind of situations. Since I moved to the UK, the answer has automatically simplified itself to 'India'. But I struggle to say it loud and clear, since I don't believe it.

It is not untrue of course, I was born in Kolkata, India and lived there for a good few years before moving with my family to Mumbai and eventually to Nashik. And there are certain memories, and a few things from my birth-city, that I remember and have idolised in my head over the years.

Most of these memories are centred around my grandparents house. As a child, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents (especially with dida (grandma)). It just so happens that the female folk of my family from my grandparents generation (both maternal and paternal grandmothers and their sisters) have been such strong and influential characters that a good part of my adolescent years I just wanted to be like them.

And as an adult I felt like I have let them down somehow - I am nowhere as much of a freethinking, independent, fearless and creative person as they were and in a time far less conducive to free thinking women. Someday I will find the courage to write each of their stories individually. But for now, let me simply relay my much more mediocre experience.

When Dida died, I went into denial. I did not want to visit Kolkata ever again, because it would make it real. (I don't even like mentioning this in a post and just spent ages on this line, deleting and re-writing it.) Another reason was also the fear that the nearest thing to what I could call a home, will not be anything like the memories in my head. The green windows will not stand out, the fuchkas will not taste as good, the people will not be smoking cigarettes in a small coffee shop debating the country's future. I have been writing a collection of poems called 'In search of home' for quite some time now, which is still unfinished, and maybe in my head I thought I will write the final chapter when I finally visit Kolkata.

None of these things happened. I was very ill when I reached Kolkata. (I fall sick a lot these days, any change of weather simply kills my immune system for some odd reason.) Sundarbans, though not a place I had been to as a child, was beautiful. We were on a boat for three days, looking for tigers. Sundarbans is one of the tiger reserves in India - and this meant that people visiting, ignore all the other wild life that they do see there, and keep looking out for the elusive tiger. We did too, and the closest to tiger that we saw were some tiger-pug marks, nothing more.

But I was fine with that. It reinstated the joy of a quest and a journey, over mere achievements. And to me that is a far more fulfilling feeling to take back with me.

And my birth-city, well it took a while for it to evoke emotions in me. Being sick meant that I could not enjoy the food that much, although I still ate a lot of fuchkas and absolutely loved it.

I may have a messed up sense of reality and I know that I look at life through a distorted lens, but I think there are indeed little dots of absolutes hidden within the relative versions of this universe, and the Kokata fuchka may just be one of them.