Reflections

Participants in Action

Having practiced photography for only a few years now I was a little nervous when asked to ‘mentor’ a few school children on photography. It’s tough telling someone ‘how to take a picture?’ first of all you have to make sure that you don’t fracture their style and impose your ideas about people and aesthetics on the students. Then you have to be confident enough to suggest ideas to them and help them out with the camera if need be. It’s funny because when others are being taught about the basics of the camera, you begin to wonder why you don’t remember any of those things. Luckily of course there’s always that piece of advice, ‘don’t worry about the technical bit, just focus on the picture’. That piece of advice worked exceedingly well.

The students were extremely perceptive and eager to learn, willing to get wet and dirty for a picture, sometimes forgetting that I was insisting on an umbrella only for the sake of the poor camera.  It was great to watch the students approach policemen and labourers on the road asking them if they’d like to pose for a picture. Then walking up to a hill top and trying to clandestinely get pictures of the airport. That is when I began to realize the bargaining power the camera suddenly gave them and what it meant for a young girl from Jari Mari to walk up to a bunch of policemen in the police chowkie and ask if she could take a picture of them together. It really didn’t matter much that the policemen refused and the picture never really ‘happened’. But that is one image that I shall take back with me, because I know that I wouldn’t walk into a police station and ask if I could take a picture of policmen sitting around there. The time spent at the workshop may have been short and I can’t claim to have gotten to know much about the students who were photographing with me, but I suppose the purpose of photography is to actually break barriers between people; in some small way that is what happened at Jari Mari.  Nikhil Titus

Workshop Session

My experience at Nazara workshop was, I later realized, the experience of most of my classmates. I have never seen myself in a position of a good ‘facilitator’. I am not even a good ‘group worker’ so guiding a group is out of question. But what I realized later was that the kids we met there (who later became our friends) had something to teach us too. So it was not solely my responsibility to teach them. This mutual process made the whole thing look easy and more than that it became enjoyable. Teaching them the technique to use a camera just became a starting point of our interaction. I kept thinking about my inhibitions or rather fear of handling any new technology. But I didn’t see that fear bothering them a single bit. One thing struck me soon after we started interacting, that when I was their age I was certainly not as smart as them.

One thing bothered me when we accompanied them in the market and other public places. It was the glances of people around as we walked. Though I didn’t have any awkwardness in me as I mixed with them, it was my attire that may be made me stand out. Or was that just my mind game? I don’t know. Ashwini Falnikar

More Action...

Day in Dindoshi

Sitting a year back in my cozy room in Saltlake city (Kolkata), I would not have thought that a year later I would be in Mumbai and walking the lanes of either Dharavi or Dindoshi. The first was still a part of my intellectual imagination, but Dindoshi was a place that I had not even heard of before. What did I expect? What was I going to look for? Was it an opportunity to interact with this community of slum dwellers who the government had rehabilitated to high rise instead of low rise slums? What kind of exchange would the day bring? How similar/different would it be from Dharavi?

Well, in a sense it was an opportunity because otherwise I would not have found access to a space and a community like this in a city I hardly knew. Also being cocooned in a comfortable middle class existence is not conducive to such ‘excursions’. As we drove into that cluster of flats, firstly it seemed at one end of the city – the outskirts. Was it because there were no spaces close to their previous homes or was it that they were being invisibilized once again? Did the government not want this group of residents anywhere near the city that was rapidly transforming itself into a real estate paradise for the ‘upwardly mobile’ classes? Then half the flats were unoccupied. Why? They seemed straight out of a world which Edgar Allen Poe would have imagined – where seemingly strange and absurd things keep happening. The windows without railings, the unlived-ness of these houses that never became homes, the towering ugliness of these buildings were haunting to say the least.

Then we met the kids – more like adolescent youth who were residents of Dindoshi. They were a mixed group – both boys and girls were a part of it. The setting was familiar to me – in my previous job at Kalam Margins Write, we used to go into a particular marginalized community and conduct poetry workshops. The idea behind that was to reach out to the youth and through the art of poetry assist them in exploring an identity which was not just ‘marginalized’, but one which they could claim as poets instead. In Dindoshi too, I felt we were doing something like that. We (a group of 8 students from CMCS) mentored about 16 youth from the community to take photographs of their choice. Nagesh started the session by talking a bit about the aesthetics and politics of photography and some basic technicalities of the camera.

After lunch, we went out with our respective ‘protégés’ so that they could take photographs of their surroundings. The place where Siraj and I had gone was just outside the Dindoshi apartments and very near Film City. The scenes outside the cramped flat complex were idyllic and Siraj was having a blast on his own – he did not really require any ‘guidance’. Sometimes the biggest help a mentor can offer is to let go and be there when they return. It was disconcerting to wear the mantle of a teacher again – one feels such responsibility for making another person learn and understand something! And such lack when you are not being able to put across something in a simpler fashion. But Siraj I repeat, was a very quick learner and quite self-sufficient. In fact, it is always humbling to be teaching adolescents because you go there feeling like you ‘know’ something and you quickly realize how insufficient your knowledge is and how sharp the students are! I keep feeling like at their age I was much less self-assured than most of them are. I only hope that the day does not remain a one-off thing, but culminates in something they can work on later as well. Pooja Das Sarkar

Jari Mari Workshop by Nagma

Reflections on Jari Mari

I thoroughly enjoyed this experience of teaching and learning from the girls in the school on photography. I was particularly impressed by the girls Asma and Parveen, with whom I had worked at Jarimari. Apart from clicking some amazing pictures, I was overwhelmed when Asma after our photo shoot told me “I went to places I am not supposed to go. The way I roamed today, I have never roamed before”.

I found her statement reflecting ideas of Shilpa Phadke’s article “If women could risk pleasure”. She talks about how important it is to situate private violence in the larger framework of not just public and private but also community, family, restrictions and self policing.
One of the reasons women in India tolerate violence is because of the lack of understanding that even the so called trivial acts of violence (cat calls, lack of access to public spaces) is necessarily violence. I guess this tolerance also comes because of the denial of space even in the private, for ex. lack of freedom of expression at homes, or hushing topics that are remotely related to sexuality, gender etc.

For Asma, the day out at her own neighbourhood, was legitimized because I was there, there was a purpose and it was all sanctioned by the school and teachers. I understand the concerns of family pressures of letting a young girl out alone in the streets, but somehow I feel this is just adding on to a vicious circle of conforming of the patriarchal norms.

Mumbai is perhaps the only city where I felt an absolute freedom to access public space. At other places, I am Asma who would need a legitimate reason to walk out in the streets. Nandita Thomas