"So and So" episodes.

 





So, we shoot a tiny little pilot, and then start editing it in our office. Reading tutorials on Adobe Premier on the side, Harini gets to work, Ziba takes some footage and starts to experiment with it. It all starts to look real. Frame by frame. Cut after cut. It starts to become very clear. Something stirs. We start to look for funding. Start to talk to people who could guide us in any direction. Most of them strangers sometimes on the lead of a friend or an acquaintance - Why don't you speak to so and so?

That is exactly what we did :) Speak to anyone who would care to lift our phone and have a chat with us. Sometimes indulged sufficiently, sometimes brushed aside. Many times ignored even. But it felt good to be out there, having decided that we needed to do this film. It couldn't be that tough now, can it?

Yes it could be.

The Pilot

A phone. A camera. A few close friends. Should we? Should we not? We start making a few calls to our closest friends. Harneeta, Harini, Neeti and Apreeta. We tell them about our conversations. We tell them about what we want to do. And just like that, we decide a date, time, and a place. What follows is the first glimpse into the camera of what could happen if we were to do the film. An honest account of emotions felt so deeply that the edit machine just seemed to gobble up sentences spoken by our lovely friends. It all started to seem real. Like a possibility waiting to be explored. Leaving us inspired and aching to do more. That inside each one us was a journey imprinted, a life chart etched, of how we viewed ourselves and our choices. Our life and its meaning. And a celebratory account of making our peace with every single wave that we had risen with by far.

For that we are deeply indebted to these four girls.

Step 2 of SWCD

Step 2 came gradually, gingerly. The conversation on the mat, and the sound recording on the cell phone kept playing in my mind long after my closest friend had physically gone back to her life in Toronto.

I constantly found myself mulling over the changing equation of how women had always done things, as opposed to what women were doing now, and thinking and feeling. How I was thinking and feeling, how my life was changing, how my friends were feeling, how their life was changing. 

We were just women trying to live our lives, making sense of all the decisions and choices we had made, and how each woman I had met had a unique perspective on how she was leading her life, I had to connect with the women of my generation, and these times. The fabric looked different somehow, there were so many shades. Maybe I could seek to inspire my own self in my own urban reality, maybe I could reconnect, or relate, most of all maybe I could understand this process a little better, and celebrate it instead of it just being a trail-less thought like a comet in the sky.

It was a clear day, I called Ziba, as we do every morning. She on her first cup of coffee, me staring out of my balcony with my cup of tea in my hand. Exchanging stories from our daily, everyday lives. Switching between being just two friends catching up on life and being filmmakers, running a production house together - home woes to excel sheet spreads. At some point we started to talk about the possibility of shooting this story somehow.  Everything that was holding us back, and everything that was opening up to us, all the pros and cons. We spoke for a long time. By the time we had put the phone down, we were a tiny step closer to doing the film.

Written By
Roohi

Rewind to the year 2010

The year is 2010, the tail end of it actually. The past few years have been so frantic. Tumbling into each other at breakneck speed almost.  The ordinary and the extra ordinary. The landmark moments and the silent, quiet, routine ones. Beneath it all simmers a gently raging thought, a dialogue, an urge to understand the process of it all. Often caught unawares while driving, staring into the red and green blinking lights, surrounded with sky scrapers, incessant honking and an ever increasing list of things to be done, matters to be dealt with.

The thought, sometimes triggered by a song, an article in the paper, a scene from a film, hits out. But mostly raising its head during conversations of the ethereal kinds with like-minded people. Or staring right into a woman's eyes momentarily understanding the unsaid. Feeling that we are changing, all of us. Just like the ever changing cities and cultures we live in. Everyone is stepping up to keep pace with life itself. With their own reality. Playing running and catching in the urban jungles surrounded with a sea of energies.

Somewhere in between the mish mash of all this living, a close friend makes a yearly trip to India. And just like that, late at night, we find ourselves sitting on a mat, exchanging our thoughts. The only time when the house is quiet, when the kids have gone to bed, the kitchen has been wrapped up, the lights dimmed and the ever present sounds of the apartment and the city quietened. That magical hour which takes you right back to who you were, where you are, and where you are headed to. That one conversation that we record on our cell phones, she and I, so that we can play it back years later. And that is how the thought latches on, we, the women of the urban cesspool, who are we? We, mere girls a few years back, how did we become the decision makers of our own life? What do we think of? How do we make sense of our lives? Why don't we hear more from the likes of us? Our influences so similar, our choices so diverse. Choices that we sometimes look back upon regretfully and choices we sometimes celebrate. The thought was here to stay. It was time finally to make sense of those choices. 2010, almost the tail end of it.









Written By
Roohi