Ship of Theseus (2012)
Director: Anand Gandhi; Writer: Anand Gandhi, Khushboo Ranka, Pankaj Kumar; Producer: Ruchi Bhimani, Anand Gandhi, Mitesh Shah, Mukesh Shah, Sohum Shah, Hugo Weaving; Cinematographer: Pankaj Kumar; Editor: Sanyukta Kaza, Adesh Prasad, Satchit Puranik; Cast: Aida Elkashef, Yogesh Shah, Faraz Khan, Hannan Youssef, Narendra Shah, Chitra Shah, Manan Shah, Aishwarya, Balaji Janardhan, Abbas K., Bharat Pardesi, Pradeep Sinha, Akhtar Bhale, Sidharth Meer, Bonnie Chenevier, Vivek Manek, Megha Ramaswamy, Wendy Gracias, Orlando Gracias, Kalist Cardoza, Krishna Bansal, R.N. Shukla, Divya Bhatia, Maxima Basu, Maysoon El Masry, Neeraj Kabi, Shukla Vinay, Jeetu Yadav, Sunip Sen, K.G. Munshi, Kinnari Ramanathan, Sachin Pandey, Deepak Desai, Bhumika Busa, Amit Shah, Vipul Binjola, Manoj Shah, Praful Gandhi, Kuldeep Mamania, Umarshi Dedhia, Mahendra Shrivas, Shahdat Ikram, Subhash, Rohit Mokariya, Yagya Saxena, Jayshree Gandhi, Jyotsna Bhayani, Bhayani, Alka Desai, Amita Mamaniya, Khushbu Shah, Ramnik Parekh, Ragini Sen, Dinkerrai Mehta, Manav, Aswani, Preeti, Krishna, Vijay, Swathi, Santosh, Arushi Nayar, Neelam Pathania, Maya, Sohum Shah, Sameer Khurana, Arun Doshi, Amba Sanyal, Bhagwan 'Raju' Mahato, Christina Zakiesato, Mukhtiyar Ali, Paromita Vohra, Rakesh Yadav, Damyanti Trivedi, Sanjay Bhatia, Madhavi Juvekar, Yashwant Wasnik, Rupesh Tillu, Mats Qviström, Efva-Wiktoria Rodell, Emma Gilljam, Khushboo Ranka, Siddharth Singh Tiwari, K.P. Ramanadham, Prince, Vikram Singh, Rekha Bhimani, Niloufer, Mattias Pettersson
Duration: 02:24:28; Aspect Ratio: 2.350:1; Hue: 94.319; Saturation: 0.023; Lightness: 0.350; Volume: 0.109; Cuts per Minute: 8.354; Words per Minute: 48.299
Summary: If the parts of a ship are replaced, bit-by-bit, is it still the same ship? A celebrated experimental photographer struggles with the loss of her intuitive genius as an unexpected aftermath of a physical change; an intellectual monk confronting a complex ethical dilemma with a long held ideology, has to choose between principle and death; and a young stockbroker, following the trail of a stolen kidney, learns how intricate morality could be. These disparate characters manifest philosophical dilemmas in their personal lives, but their narratives converge to reveal an even larger fabric of connections, meaning, beauty, existence and death in a delicately poetic finale.
The 'Ship of Theseus' Reader
And Now For Something Utterly Unique…..
A Bout of Meta- Sutradhaari: The Story of this Story about a Story
or,
On the Identity of a Film. We begin, with the story of these annotations themselves; for their genesis is perhaps the most expressive portrait of the nature of media, scholarship and collaboration; their ever changing nature setting new precedents in the way we visualize and use information.
As with most works of culture, Ship of Theseus began in the mind of its author- in this case, its writer/director, Anand Gandhi, 27 at the time- as a series of ideas, concepts and knowledge informed by years of life experience. He was nursing his grandparents in the hospital, spending long days and longer nights, surrounded by Life's two oldest friends- Messrs Death and Disease. Immersed in the quaint medical smells and bleak sounds of the ward, he spent a lot of time in solitude, silently thinking hard about many things that had obsessed him for the last decade- religion and spirituality, science and rationality, paradox and philosophy, storytelling and narrative; life, the universe and everything. The germ of the idea was for a feature film, which he began to develop. Navigating the long haul of time across a slow burn of challenges; it would take him four years to write, produce, shoot, edit and release the film. Working with a singular sense of monomaniacal focus, he put together a core team of more than fifty people, collaborate with hundreds more, and the film went on to reach diverse audiences across the world.
Let us now consider, the several modes of being, that 'Ship of Theseus' has inhabited. Since those days in the hospital, when the film existed as fragments in Anand's mind, it has taken on various forms of existence, the first part of which is perhaps common to all films. First as abstract ideas, then as a collection of written scenes that was then developed by Anand into a full length-screenplay in the year 2008-09. As finances were arranged, the frameworks and processes of film production were places upon the 138-odd pieces of paper; the shoot began. After numerous long, arduous schedules that took the team from the crowded market streets of Mumbai to the cold climes of Stockholm, ‘Ship of Theseus’ existed as forty hours of DSLR footage. In the year 2010-11, this raw material was then painstakingly edited, colour-graded, sound-designed and packaged into a feature film. It began doing its rounds of film festivals in the year 2011-12, leading up to an Indian theatrical release in 2013.
The story of most films ends there. Once a film has finished its multiple rounds of sprinting around the circular economics of investment, recovery, and profit; it then becomes a static cultural object, privately owned by an individual or corporation. The question of what is the destiny of cultural material has been an old one, stretching back to ancient times. The question, as applied to the medium of film, and the artefacts it churns out- footage, video and films is as old as the film medium itself, just over a 100 years- and its traditional answer throughout the ages has been flat, dull, uni-dimensional and single-worded: Archival.
This word has however been turned on its head, and consequently changed the collective fate of all culture; supplemented by a mind-boggling wave of change in the last three decades, via the emergence of internet-enabled Open Culture. The colossal proliferation of articles, papers, books, videos and films, both legally procured or illegal scanned/copied and shared; has been a phenomenon truly unique to the times we live in. It has caused knowledge to seep through the narrowest of cracks of the global human network, reaching places it had never even remotely touched in the past. And as for the impact that such knowledge causes in society, one has to only look at the number of entrepreneurs and artists who are using technology to enable social and cultural change of all kinds.
The existence, journey and impact of Ship of Theseus has an integral relationship to global open culture. Anand, whose curiosities, interests and obsessions could fill an entire Klein Bottle; was a voracious reader of literature and science throughout his childhood and adolescent years. By the time he had reached his mid-20’s, the internet too had matured; and made nearly everything openly available- from a 16 hour looped video of an animated cat moving through space, leaving a rainbow trail behind it; to esoteric scientific papers on the genetic code of earthworms. Websites, torrents and Film Festivals made it possible to access culture that would otherwise be heart-breakingly remote to a curious young person in India. It was this vast reserve of freely available cultural and scientific material, which caused Anand to explore uncharted territories of world cinema, design, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, history and philosophy. It was the kind of online reach-out and community-building that can happen only today, which enabled the film’s theatrical release campaign in India, with tens of thousands of people from 32 cities voting for the film to be released in theatres. It was the instant, border-smashing potential connections between people enabled by social media that brought a number of people on board this cinema-ship, right from the film’s Hungarian Sound Designer, Gabor Erdyei to the writer of this sentence you are reading right now.
It was only natural then, that in late 2013, once the half-decade long tug-o’war of economics had finished and the dust settled, Anand decided to make the film free and its material open-source. The team visualized an online platform to make this footage usable and editable in an interactive way. The interface would also make possible text inputs during individual scenes, explaining the story, text, context, sub-text, visuals and the various meta-narratives; like footnotes to a film.
Then, as it seemingly happens when purposes align, the subtle spirals of synchronicity churned, as they sometimes do in the mysterious clockwork bearings of our universe. An alliance formed with the fine folks at
CAMP, a Culture Collective in Mumbai, who with a belief in Open Source Culture and skills spanning multiple disciplines had created what the SoT team had only begun to visualize and think about creating. CAMP, which at this point could stand for anything from the dutifully sombre “Critical Art and Metaphorical Publics” to the delightfully wacky, recursive “Camp Around More Peripheries”, had built this spectacular Archival Ark you are viewing this content in. A repository of video content that enabled all forms of editing, data analysis and annotations, it was the result of years of work by the
CAMP team- Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, Zinnia Ambapardiwala, Sebastian Lütgert, Jan Gerber, Lawrence Liang and Sanjay Bhangar. The initial metadata for the site was based on Film Scholar
Ashish Rajadhyaksha's seminal 'Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema' published by the British Film Institute. Their efforts culminated in two platforms- pad.ma for footage and clips, and indiancine.ma for finished films. As friendships were formed, visions were shared, and a common penchant for wildly digressive conversations was given full reign; the plan crystallized- thirty-two hours of the footage would be collated, tagged and uploaded on to
https://pad.ma and
https://indiancine.ma. They would then be annotated in an attempt to tinker around the beginning of an enormous, powerful vision- of editable, annotated, free and open-source video content that would be universally accessible.
And that is the story of how this unique new form- the readable, watchable, annotated film emerged in the case of 2013’s Ship of Theseus. Much like the universe itself, a film begins with immersive darkness. As we now move onto the film itself and its annotations, we evoke some very old words, a version of which is found in every culture. As a kind-eyed, angry-faced, bearded old man is reported to have said two thousand years ago, Fiat Lux- Let there be Light.
Annotations
CAMP
SoT Timeline
The 'Ship of Theseus' Reader,
Or
Over 500 Variations on a Theme from PlutarchA Chronology2003
Right Here Right Now
2006
Continuum2008
Anand writes the Screenplay.
The team begins to form.
2009 Pre Production Begins.
Blind Photographer Story is shot
2010 Monk and Stockbroker stories are shot.
Parallel Edit process Begins.
2011-2012 Post Production begins.
Sound Design, Color Grading and Packaging.
The Final Cut is created.
The Film enters Festival Circuit to acclaim.
2013
Festival Journey Continues
India release in July, with a Vote for your City campaign.
2014
Open Source Vision forms.
Collaboration with
CAMP.
Film released online for Free
32 hours of footage is collated.
2015-
Footage uploaded and tagged on
https://pad.ma
Film uploaded and annotated on
https://indiancine.ma
https://pad.ma/grid/title/project==Ship_of_TheseusHow to read these Annotations?Let us begin to address this question with a description of the physical structures within this digital interface. The video filmstrip is horizontal, and proceeds from left to right as the film progresses. Adjacent to the filmstrip, the annotations run downwards, from top to bottom.
They begin with keywords, and are followed by stacked layers of notes. For this particular full-length film annotation, the following structure has been followed:
Keywords: The displayed clip is tagged with all possible words and phrases that arise from the film- its
visuals, dialogue, text, context, sub-text and meta-narratives, laying upon the video a framework for all possible types of annotations, suggesting the scope and range of the annotation that follows.
Layer 1:
A Brief Footnote about the primary content in the scene.
Layer 2:
A detailed essay/article explaining more of the themes associated with the scene.
Layer 3:
Notes from the Director in First Person talking about the scene, the inspiration behind it or the experience of writing/shooting/editing it.
The annotations are a modified take on the classical tripartite method of Indian scriptural interpretation-
"Sandarbh Sahit Vyakhya"- 'Explanation with Reference., followed by a direct end-note from the author.'If read only by themselves, the annotations have been written, to be read in three possible ways, each one functioning as a coherent, independent, non-fiction narrative. Depending on how deeply the reader would like to engage with the material, she/he can choose to read:
1. A single layer throughout the film- only the first for a short intro, only the second for a longer one, or only the third for a direct conversation with the Director.
2. The first and second layers- which will read like a fun encyclopedia entry.
3. All three layers, including the Director's notes for a complete reading experience.
Watching whilst Reading: A New Neurological ProcessFor the more adventurous cinephiles, there is an alternate way to experience an annotated film, a combination of watching and reading. Depending on the watcher-reader’s preference for how large a chunk of reading she/he can chew on whilst watching a film, she/he can read the first layer, the first two layers or the first three layers.
The watcher-reader will go through a very specific cycle- an alternating mechanism of watching a scene, and then reading an annotation; watching the next scene and then its annotation, with this two-step process repeating until the end of the film. For any scene, the corresponding annotation is supposed to both enhance the understanding and experience of the scene by gently unweaving the cinematic rainbow and highlighting the beauty of the colours that make it.
And what about the intention and purpose of the annotation itself? Perhaps the most important mark of an effective annotation would be- if after having read it, instead of directly proceeding to the next scene, the watcher-reader re-watches the annotated scene, and then moves forward. And from this arises what one could term the “Experience Dynamic” of an annotated film- Watch, Read, Re-Watch; Watch, Read, Re-Watch.
In the end, as we present these annotations to you, whether you watch, read or watch and read; it is our sincere hope that this process, when repeated several times results in knowledge, amusement, happiness and who knows, perhaps even enlightenment.
The venerable Central Board of Film Certification (often referred to by Indian Entertainment Industry folks, in soft tones of awe and finality, as “The Censor Board”) is a statutory censorship and classification body under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. It gives out three major certifications for films- U for “Unrestricted Public Exhibition”, UA- which is the same as the previous one, but “With Parental Guidance,” and A- “For Adults Only”.
The Board makes the decision of which certification to hand out, after a careful perusal of films for violence, nudity and sexuality in the content, as well as abusive language in the text. In the case of this particular film, the esteemed Board observed some abusive language in colloquial Marathi in the background chatter of a scene, concluding that it was nothing quite prevalent or potentially insidious. Violence- as an idea and phenomenon is a topic of obsessive discussion among the characters, some of the characters also practicing soft and slow yet severe forms of self-abuse, but these are sub-textual, and so the film was given a full pass through the pearly gates of violence censorship. The last circle to walk through was that of sexual content- the International Cut of the film had an extended scene in which a conversation takes place between two characters, one of them frontally nude, as he showers and puts on clothes, while his girlfriend stands next to him. This was cut out though, to just a close-up of the girl’s face in the version for Indian theatres. At the end of the screening, the censor board attendees, who had tremendously enjoyed the film, many of them moved by its characters, visuals, ideas and concerns, awarded it a UA certificate.
Director's Notes:
AG: “The film was an experiment in many ways. Now we want to take this experiment forward and invite people to make their own Ship of Theseus. With the original film available for reference, one can play with the footage, change the storyline or make an entirely new movie altogether. We’re trying to create an online encyclopedia for cinema. With that in place, the possibilities are endless. This sort of public collaboration has the potential to change the way we experience cinema. Students of cinema can learn how we made the film and it also gives us a chance to relive the experience."
Censor Board of India
Censor Certificate
Central Board of Film Certification, India
Director's Notes: AG: "The government has to support the ideas and images that are challenging. How else do we push the culture forward? The censor laws are extremely ambiguous. But my own interaction with the censor board has been nothing but positive. But having said that, we need to fight the idea of A certified films not being screened on Doordarshan. There is absolutely no logic, no reason that allows for a ruling like that to exist. We live in a diverse environment where a lot of communities/ groups have not had the privilege to information and certain kind of world view. And those being exposed to a certain image might challenge them in a way that could have much serious physical social manifestation. But that fear and paranoia is no reason for us to succumb to censorship."
The language mentioned on the certificate is
‘Hinglish’ a sprightly, delicious blend of Hindi and English, topped with some Punjabi, Haryanvi and Marathi garnished with a light speckling of South Indian languages. It is one of the many fascinating ‘Macaronic’ languages in the world, that arise from a geographical blend of words from many languages, performing a sort of cross-linguistic alchemy to create unique new idioms of expression. Anand has always been fascinated by how communication is both limited and transcended by language, and experimented with multiple languages throughout his work. His debut short film, Right Here Right Now, which he made when he was 22, had eight languages in it- English, Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Marathi. SoT too, features a total of six languages that occur both individually and ‘macaroni’cally- Arabic, English, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi and Swedish.
Director's Notes: AG: "I feel the cinematic medium has been really underutilized, mostly because it is a very expensive one – is hence, driven by market forces, which in turn are informed by instinctive life sustaining objectives – so, narratives of violence, sex, romance and conquest get multiplied over and over again, and more complex areas of inquiry and exploration get pushed out of the discourse. I can’t think of any other experience that triggers mirror neurons the way cinema does. The immediacy of the cinematic experience forces the audience to contemplate and seek answers. In that, it mirrors one of the functions of dreams and nightmares – to prepare the mind for eventualities. I feel if the Buddha was around, he would have used the medium of motion picture to share his worldview."
"I was raised a voracious film watcher, so I have seen everything made in the 80s and the 90s.In my late teens and early twenties, my taste evolved, and my consumption started going down. Over the years, I have found myself increasingly (and consistently) drawn towards the cinema of Roy Andersson and Michael Haneke. My cinema thinking has been informed by Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr. I have largely loved the work of Lars Von Trier and Terrence Mallick. I have thousands of guilty pleasures, of course, that have perhaps inspired just as much."
Enlighten
Enlighten FIlm Society
Enlighten is a film society in Mumbai. Enlighten Company is an Indian private organization working towards the promotion of World Cinema in the subcontinent. Founded by Pranav Ashar in 2006, the group operates through two related but legally distinct operations: a Film Society structured as a non-profit organization and a DVD label structured as a private limited company.
Enlightenment, and all the little thrills and worries the pursuit of it brings; happens to be a major topic of discussion and a chief obsession of many of the characters in, and the folks behind this film. The word ‘enlighten’ itself appears in the film thrice; in the second story. It appears twice as part of a joke question and its punchline-answer between the Monk and the Lawyer; and again in a serious assessment by the Monk of life and its purpose.
In 2011, when the film was being put together, Anand was invited to TEDx Gateway, an independent TED event in Mumbai. In a free-wheeling presentation, he showcased many of the ideas that were brewing in his head at the time. His talk, titled
‘Is Enlightenment Googleable?’ is replete with references to Borges, Zen, Asimov, Evolution among a multitude of other topics that are embedded in the film.
Talk: (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y19StzTCLYI)
Transcript: (
http://recyclewala.blogspot.in/2010/10/tedx.html)
No Pun or Reference Intended.
Seriously.
None whatsoever.
Ticker
As we continue to point out the ubiquity and relevance of everything that is open source- in the world, in culture, and in this film, it is worth noting that this video of the vintage car zooming along a road in 1930’s Bombay itself is a free, archival one. Anand found it on the interwebs and used it to make the ticker in 2011.
The words ‘Bombay Astern’ flash across the scene. Co-incidentally keeping in tune with the Nautical title-framing and imagery of the film, an astern- from ‘a’ and ‘stern’ is used to refer directions- behind or towards the rear of a ship or aircraft.
Director's Notes:AG: "Kiran Rao first learnt of the film from Cameron Bailey, the director of TIFF. She kept hearing of it from many other sources after its premiere. She came to the Mumbai screening organised by the Enlighten Film Society. The film really resonated with her, and we decided to work together from there on. She wanted to help out with the film, and we felt the best way she could help would be to present the film to the audiences in India."
"Kiran is an amazing woman. She’s so driven and passionate about the cinema she loves. And it’s been a while since she said that a film has meant so much to her. She loved the film. She said that “I have not had this kind of a cinematic experience in the longest time.” You tell me, what’s next. We started talking about life, universe, cinema. We became really good friends, and in that period I kinda suggested about the possibility of her presenting the film. For the last few years, she has already engaged with a lot of audience. She’s made Dhobi Ghat, she’s produced
Peepli [Live]. She knows the infrastructure very well. She knows this particular audience very well, who is a certain audience for this film. She also knows how to use the infrastructure to expand into the audience, who yet don’t know that they want to see this film. I feel there is a huge audience out there who haven’t sampled this kind of cinema and who hence don’t know yet that they want to see this. Once they see it, they would completely get hooked on to it. They would be like, “Oh fuck, yeh kyun koi nahi banata?” You look at youtube, twitter reactions, and people are saying life-changing experience, etc., there is also an audience how is saying “humne aisa kuch dekha hi nahi hai. Why don’t people make this in Bollywood?” So there is an audience that has not yet had a privilege that I had when I was 17 years old, who will come to this film and say this is the kind of cinema we want to see. And Kiran becomes a great medium for that kind of a communication. She’s already established an infrastructure, she already has access to a huge audience with whom she has been engaging with. She has also gained a huge amount of trust with distributors and exhibitors. She has brought in a huge amount of force that is becoming the vehicle of the film."
Fair Winds at the Film Festival:
How SoT charted its course to Indian audiences. In just over a hundred years of development, Cinema as a medium has geographically spread to every region on the planet, more than 140 countries today have their own film industries, each displaying their own particular style of working within the medium. Today, there are an estimated 3000 film festivals that happen across the world every year. By celebrating cinema from across the world, they have managed to bring together all the skills, crafts, vocations and people that comprise the global film movement. They have facilitated the most important call of the day in such a diffused environment- community-building. The story of how this particular film made its way to people across the world is a testament to the power of the world cinema community.
From the year 2012 onwards, SoT’s voyage too, was aided by the helpful gusts of winds that are film festivals across the world. Its screenings at TIFF in September elicited some very powerful reactions from audiences. It was warmly received and won a Special Mention at the BFI London Film Festival 2012. The film would go on to be showcased at numerous festivals across the world- Brisbane, Sydney, Transylvania, Dubai, Rotterdam, Hong Kong and Munich among others
In what Anand described as a ‘homecoming’, the film was showcased in Mumbai at MAMI in October, for a live audience of a thousand people. The particularly passionate Mumbai audiences received the film with great enthusiasm. It was through the interest generated in the festival circuit that Kiran Rao, who had heard so much about the film, attended a screening in Mumbai by Enlighten Film Society. The film profoundly connected with her, and a natural friendship grew between her and Anand, as they discussed Life, the Universe, Cinema and everything. Keen to take the film to wider audiences, they worked together, with Kiran officially presenting the film for its Indian theatrical release in July 2013.
Kiran Rao
Kiran Rao is a screenwriter, director and producer filmmaker based in Mumbai, India. Her debut film, Dhobi Ghat premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010. After hearing about Ship of Theseus from Cameron Bailey, the director of TIFF; and later from many others, she saw the film some months later at a screening in Mumbai. The film deeply resonated with her, and a natural collaboration developed with Anand and the team. She presented the film to Indian audiences for its theatrical release in July 2013.
Presenter
Anand’s cinematic philosophy always included a strong, burning desire to make motion pictures that were truly unique and spoke to the concerns of contemporary art and society. This was used as a base for forming ‘Recyclewala’ in its incarnation as formed by a partnership between Anand and Sohum Shah, who plays the stockbroker in the film. It morphed into Recyclewala Labs, with an added vision of using motion picture and its allied arts as a tool to initiate dialogue, examine belief systems, interpret new data, stimulate profound experiences and engage with the greatest breakthroughs in thinking and knowing. It was this particular set-up which enabled the processes and alliances that led to these annotations. And perhaps not surprisingly, since this is the Indian sub-continent- with time, the spate of re-incarnations continued, and the sub-units went on to form separate entities. Today the feature film unit is Recyclewala Films Pvt. Ltd., while Anand heads Memesys Labs, a film production studio and media lab.
Cyclewala
Recyclewala
The word ‘Recyclewala’ is a play on ‘Cyclewala’, Anand’s first production company, under the banner of which he made his first two short films- Right Here, Right Now and Continuum.
As we are about to enter the first frame of the film, let us take a moment to pay obeisanceto the Cinematic Eye- the Camera.
SoT is the first feature film to be shot entirely on a Canon EOS 1D Mark IV DSLR Camera. The camera above was the primary one used to shoot the film, hoisted upon the sturdy shoulders of DoP Pankaj Kumar, assisted by a capable team of three. The DSLR package designed and rented by the team went onto become the standard, most-requested DSLR package in Mumbai's Camera rental market; providing an Equipment Template for young filmmakers in the city.
Camera
Canon EOS 1D Mark IV
Director's Notes:AG: "As it has occurred repeatedly in history, a paradox is illusory in nature, an invitation to dig deeper and arrive at a solution, a consensus. So, you have a thesis that sounds perfectly logical, and an anti-thesis that also sounds logical and has enough empirical proof. But they don’t match; they’re against each other, giving rise to the paradox. Often, in the history of thought, we have found that there is always a consensus. There is always a possibility of this dialectical fusion where you can take the thesis and anti-thesis and make a consensus, which should be a holistic worldview.It is very interesting. The bodies of our cells regenerate every seven years. An individual goes through a shift psychologically, ideologically and physically. Is it still the same person? The answers depend on what questions one asks.
The ship is the same ship if its function and essence is not changed; the function being carrying the army of Theseus from the ship to the other shore. You can argue that the essence is nothing but cumulative function of parts working together. The essence is not isolated, but a function of parts coming together and working in harmony. If the army and the ship are both replaced with new parts then it will not be original. The true replacement would be when every part of the ship is replaced.
Hegel proposed the idea of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It’s a very interesting philosophical division between the Orient and the Occident when it comes to Ship of Theseus. The oriental worldview is that the essence matters more than the form. If the function (essence, blueprint) is the same, it’s still the same building. The Occident and religious philosophies say there is only one life, only book, only one god, there’s only one solution. That is, it is new each time. It’s not the same thing at all. If you fuse them together then you get the answers, the understanding that everything is in a constant state of flux. It’s not just the building that is going through a change of parts, there is also the time dimension, there is also the temporal dimension. And because of the temporal dimension everything is in a constant state of flux. You do not step into the same river twice.
Epigraph
Paradox
Pax Paradoxica, or How to reconcile OppositesIt was Plutarch of Ancient Greece- a historian, writer of biographies and essays who was one of the first to memorably render this paradox in his book of biographies, Parallel Lives. In lore, the ship being referred to was the vehicle that the demi-god Theseus used to cross the ocean and slay a fearsome creature known as the Minotaur. The Ship, upon returning became an artefact, a symbol of Greek pride for the people of Athens, and every year I would set sail for three weeks during the Delia festival, during which the citizens would absolve from violence. As the ritual went on for centuries, people saw the parts constantly being replaced, but its function remaining the same- the chief artifact for honoring Apollo at the Delia festival every year.
The subject of its change was so widely discussed, that the Ship became aa standard example among the philosophers, for addressing the nature of change and difference, of blooming growth and waning decay.
Across more than two thousand years of discussion, the question has generally divided curious, sincere inquirers into two camps. Some people thought of the ship’s identity as staying intact throughout the dismantling process. Others insisted that its identity was lost when the parts get replaced. People whose cultures have belief systems that are heavily based on rationality and order, with a belief in the supreme reality of the material world will insist that because the physical attributes have changed, the object has changed too, it is no longer the same one. Cultures that believe in higher dimensions of reality, with an emphasis on the temporary nature of the material world tend to think of identity in terms of function, as opposed to form.
The key to resolving paradoxes is to understand the relevance and contexts of both worldviews, accommodating them in one’s own framework of reality. These two somewhat opposing perspectives can be fused to together, resulting in a ‘resolution’ of the paradox in the inquirer’s mind.
One can also broadly contrast the above two worldviews as Occidental and Oriental. When attributing the very essence of an object, while the former tends to favour the form, the latter believes that the essence of an object lies in its function. This is best illustrated through an anecdote by Douglas Adams, about his travels in Asia.
We put on our sunglasses and cameras and went and spent the day looking at the Great Wall at Badaling, an hour or so outside Beijing. It looked to be remarkably freshly built for such an ancient monument, and probably the parts we saw had been renovated. I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.
“So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.
“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
“But it’s burnt down?”
“Yes.”
“Twice.”
“Many times.”
“And rebuilt.”
“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”
“With completely new materials.”
“But of course. It was burnt down.”
“So how can it be the same building?”
“It is always the same building.”
I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Ship of Theseus
Superimposed TitleOn a grey screen,
Fade In:"As the parts of Theseus' Ship needed repair, it was replaced part by part, up to a point where not a single part from the original ship remained in it, anymore. Is it, then, still the same ship?"
Fade In: "If all the discarded parts were used to build another ship, which of the two, if either, is the real Ship of Theseus?"
Fade Out: All text except for the words "Ship of Theseus" that stays screen centre.
Fade To Black.Graphing the EpigraphThe title and epigraph, function as a précis- a formal framework, in which to experience and contemplate the ideas presented in the screenplay and film. They present an ancient, enigmatic philosophical paradox, one that questions the concept of identity. As an object undergoes physical change, and its parts are replaced systematically, it continues to serve the function it had, and we assume its identity to be intact.
But with all of its physical parts replaced, is it still the same object?
The corollary, about the discarded parts being used to build the old ship again, suggested by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes almost five centuries later, adds a thought experiment to the mix. Hobbes noted that we would then have two identical ships, each with equal claim to be the original ship. And if neither is the real ship, what happened to it then? The situation, as Hobbes notes, is ‘absolutely absurd’.
Title Card
Ship of Theseus
Story 1: Blind Photographer
Director's Notes:AG: "Though not a 'Message' in the film, Organ Donation and its social implications are a theme throughout the narrative. By the time we finished the film, many of us in the cast and crew signed up to become Organ Donors. It's also been extremely validating to hear from so many people who were moved enough by the film to become Organ Donors themselves."
Doctor
Egypt
Eye
Eye Donation
Medical Checkup
Opening Scene
Pupil
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 1
INT. Hospital - DayA sliver of light slowly expands to reveal an eye. This is no ordinary eye. It is milky-grey where it should be white. The pupil is an off-white ring encircling more of the same grey opacity. The sliver of light opens and closes as the DOCTOR addresses ALIYA. She speaks with a middle - eastern accent. The doctor has a pronounced Indian accent.
The conversation between Aliya and her Doctor centres around the debate of Organ Donation in general and Eye Donation in specific, that was happening in Egypt around 2009, when Anand had written the screenplay. A number of young activists wanted to institutionalize a national organ donation program in Egypt. They were working towards the cause using multiple approaches towards decreasing the religious and social stigma against the practice. They not only campaigned heavily among the public and government, but also approached scholars of Islamic theology to investigate the scriptures. Islamic philosophy makes room for flexible methods to redress ethical systems, and the scholars highlighted these elements of the faith, while emphasizing on the Golden Rule, and how Organ Donation is perhaps the most practical example of doing good to your fellow humans. Their efforts bore fruit in March 2010, when the Egyptian Government sanctioned a nationwide organ donation program.
The Evolution of Ethics
A Brief History of Organ Donation in EgyptAs in most countries across the world, Organ Donation has had a tumultuous history in Egypt. IN the seventies, it was the medical and ethical aspects of the new technology that were debated in the beginning, with a religious element- interpreting the fundamentals of Islam to take a stand on the issue; only affecting the conversation much later. The eighties saw the acceptance of the practice in the rest of the Arab world- Saudi Arabia and Iraq had institutionalized nationwide organ donation programs. These were countries under the Sharia, the Islamic system of law and jurisprudence; while Egypt was not, so religious prejudice only played a small part in the debate. It was a society that no longer innovated much in the field of medicine, and hence found it difficult to come to terms with startling new forms of medical science. It did not help matters much that the public debate on the matter was diluted by one of the most popular television evangelists in Egypt. Shaykh al-Sha’rawi had a strong anti-organ donation stance, on the grounds of a somewhat absurd, high-ended philosophical precept- that the body does not belong to us, but to God, and we cannot donate what we do not own. This also made clear, that the organ donation campaigns of the West, based on the Judeo-Christian idea of giving the ‘Gift of Life’ would not find much resonance among Egypt’s public.
Various scholars, progressives, liberals and members of the press, along with patients and their pointed out the fallacious nature of al-Sha’rawi’s argument, as applied to medicine and health. They further investigated the scriptures, stressed on the importance of altruism in Islamic culture, invoking three central concepts of Islamic philosophy:
Ististlah- ‘To consider something good’
Maslahah- ‘Public Interest’
Istislah- ‘To deem proper’They also emphasized on the Golden Rule’s presence in the scriptures, in the Fortieth Hadith and other places. Organ Donation was an impeccable case of practically applying the rule- Do unto others what you would want them to do unto you. They argued that organ donation was a logical progression in medical science, one which Islamic philosophy validated quite naturally.
While this debate raged throughout the eighties and nineties, a large black market for organs began to thrive in Egypt. As is unfortunately common in a lot of developing nations, it was the poorest of the poor who would sell their organs to wealthy patients, many of them from the Middle East, for large sums of money. The call of the hour was to regularize organ donation under a public legal framework. It was the only way t curtail this particularly unethical brand of black-marketing, while servicing a long-ignored medical need of the populace. A large number of Egyptians- from healthcare, media and the development sector, continued to campaign, highlighting hard medical statistics.
The number of medical transplant specialists in the country was quite low, less than 20 in 2009. At least 40,000 Egyptian citizens needed organs every year. There were close to 7,000 road accidents every year in Egypt. The decades-long accumulation of effort bore fruit in 2010, and a nationwide program was installed to help patients and curb illegal organ trade.
Today, attitudes towards organ donations seem to be steadily improving in Egypt, and not surprisingly, due to vigorous public action. A quite hopeful instance of this occurred during the movement in Tahrir Square, where police brutality led to many eye-injuries, creating a need for cornea donations. A group of young doctors calling themselves ‘Atibaa ‘Uyun al-Thawra’ (‘The Revolution’s Eye Doctors’) started an online campaign soliciting pledges. A large number of people stepped forward, assuring to donate their eyes and other organs after death, and thereby enabling many lives of their fellow Egyptians.
Audio Support
Director’s Notes:
AG: Whenever Aliya hears the numbers from the USB dongle like device, it’s not a process of approximation anymore. Her mind has adapted to understanding these numbers. Whenever she hears these numbers she imagines light. It’s not a process of now hearing it and imagining it. It’s just like how we see light. For example- the act of catching a ball. If you were to breakdown the algorithmic calculations needed to catch the ball. You’ll have to factor in curvature, parabolic arc, velocity of the ball, gravity, weight, mass. Placing your hand in its trajectory, you estimate the impact needed to catch it. Yet it happens in an instant. The mind has evolved to make those complex calculations over thousands of years.
Image Editing Software
Lights. Sound. Intuition!The human brain has evolved to factor in a number of physical factors- like direction, wind speed, trajectory, colors, shapes and sounds into the intuitive sense of cognition. Generally, there is no need fro us to separately, consciously imagine these things as thousands of years of experience has been distilled into our genetic stream, leading to a pre-verbal sense of intuition. This sense is quite flexible, and we see some fascinating applications of it, especially in the case of people with sense-disablities. Aliya learns to use a combination of previous memories and the new audio input about the image and form a mental picture of it.
In Aliya’s case, with repeated use of the software, her mind would have developed a somewhat intuitive sense of respoinding to the numbers she hears. As soon as the numbers are read out, and the sound reaches her ears and is processed. Based on which number it is, she intuitively imagines light in the appropriate tone. Much like a sports player intuitively placing himself in the trajectory of a falling ball and catching it, Aliya’s mind is able to ‘visualize’ the photograph in terms of light, or its absence.
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 2
INT. Aliya's House - Day
Aliya skims over a touch-pad with a digital pen. As the pointer tracks through a black and white photograph, a mechanical female voice guides her.
The photograph shows a busy junction. To the right is an auto-rickshaw with a male passenger leaning out to cough. The view of the auto is frontal but angled slightly away, such that it's right profile is visible. Almost at the centre of the frame is a uniformed worker cycling away - only his back is visible. To his left, a young man stares blatantly into the lens. He is frozen mid - stride. There is a policeman in the background and a few strewn pedestrians.
With Aliya is her boyfriend Vinay but all that is visible is the surface she's working on and part of her right hand. Vinay has an anglicised accent.
Aliya’s Arsenal:
The Blind Photographer’s ToolkitItem No. 1: Image Editing Software with Audio SupportThe software Aliya uses has an onscreen reader. She works with black-and-white versions of the images she shoots, and uses a special stylus-like device to navigate through the software. A voice function helps the user ‘view’ the photograph by reading out a code for the B/W color tones and the various editing tools that the software provides.
Stylus
Aida el-Kashef
Aliya and Vinay
Faraz Khan
Director’s Notes:
“Aida is a second generation filmmaker. She had come to India to assist me in the casting process. We were auditioning actors for the boyfriend’s part, she’d sit in to read the Blind Photographer’s lines, She was just so attractive, so amazing that we could barely concentrate in the actors. We were fascinated with what she was bringing on board. She hates structure, is an incredibly intuitive artist, she likes to respond to all the stimuli within or outside the scene, very intuitively. She almost hates logic. Sometimes, I get a sense that she abhors reason and logic!”
“We were shooting this scene- with the conversation about bats and echolocation. Faraz came up to me and said that the dialogue reminded him of the Richard Dawkins book- ‘The Blind Watchmaker’. I was quite impressed that he had made the connection. I told him that I didn’t know many actors who had read Richard Dawkins. He replied that he didn’t know many filmmakers who read!”
Dramatis Personae: The Parts and their PerformersAliya Kamal
Aliya is a blind photographer, of Egypt parentage, living in Mumbai. She is celebrated for her intuitive style and fearless compositions. She captures images, visualizing through sound, touch and inference drawn from memory. She took up photography at a young age to simply log and document her memories. As her experiments with photography continued, she found herself struggling with many questions- about authorship, about subjectivity, and ultimately about the very intention of art.
Aliya Kamal is played by Aida el-Kashef, a second-generation filmmaker from Egypt, and a committed activist involved in the 2011 Revolution in Tahrir Square. She was dubbed ‘The Girl with the Camera’ for documenting the revolution in the midst of gun-toting soldiers and revolutionaries. She was featured in the documentary about the Revolution, ‘The Square’. She has directed two short films- ‘A Tin Tale’ and ‘Rhapsody in Autumn’
Anand and Aida met at the Hannover Film Festival in 2009, where their short films were screened. The following year Aida came to India to assist on the film. Her reading of the Blind Photographer’s lines captivated Anand, and she was cast in the role. Aida would go on to win multiple awards for her portrayal of the role.
Vinay
Her boyfriend, Vinay is a young man with quite the polymathic mind, and many professional interests. It is never made exactly clear what he does, simply placing him in the milieu of contemporary ‘Third Culture’ professionals- whose approach is non-conformist and inter-disciplinary, and whose work bridges the worlds of science, technology and art. Vinay writes books, gives lecture tours, sketches, records songs, makes animations and works with various materials to create objects, among many other activities.
The role of her boyfriend, Vinay is played by Faraz Khan. Orginally from Hyderabad, he moved to London to study for a degree in Information Systems, and promptly dropped out after two months. He spent the next five years working, meeting people and exploring. At the age of 26, he decided to be a performing artiste and studied at the theatre at Drama Centre and London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, worked in plays, short films and documentaries.
Faraz auditioned for the part, impressing Anand with his reading. The two had long conversations about a lot of topics, and Faraz was cast in the role of Vinay.
Screenplay Notes:
Vinay and Aliya are revealed with their backs to the camera at a partially left profile. Aliya is fair and medium built with wavy shoulder length hair. Vinay is darker, sports an unkempt stubble and has an unruly head of hair that is slightly shorter than his girlfriend's. They sit at a large table upon which a printer, a set of speakers and assorted stationery are visible. He has his arm casually draped over her shoulder. She lightly clasps his hand in response.
This sequence also contains a lengthy deleted scene, a crackerjack of a conversation between Aliya and Vinay. It begins with him reading a quite by Baudrillard on photography, he then asks her about a book by Richard Dawkins. They move onto a discussion about the senses- bats and echolocation, noses and olfaction; and about perceiving time and spatial dimensions. The book Flatland by Edwin Abbott is indirectly referenced and the two joke about Vinay’s apparent lack of hygiene, as evidenced by his frequency of showers per month. The discussion ends with a little moment the two share.
Vinay: You know they have actually found a way to prove that reality exists when nobody is looking.
Aliya: Well I think it exists and I am never looking.
Vinay: Bull shit! You're always looking.
The extended scene was rehearsed many times and shot in numerous angles, a total of 20 times. The clips can be seen on
https://pad.ma
See here-
https://pad.ma/grid/title/title=opening_conv
Embossing
Etching Machine
Screenplay Notes:
Aliya processes a print of the photograph through an etching machine. She traces the texture and lines of the resulting etch with her finger, its friction producing a crisp sand-papered sound.
The Blind Photographer’s Toolkit
Item No. 2: Etching Machine
An etching machine processes an image, flashing a laser over it, mapping the contours of borders and seperations that comprise the image. It then proceeds to print the image again, but now with its details slightly raised above the paper. The new image is now tactile- one can feel its contours and trace the image through the sense of touch.
Vectorizing
Al Ahram is an Egyptian newspaper, founded in Alexandria in 1875 by two Lebanese brothers. The second oldest newspaper in the country, it is considered to be the equivalent for Egyptians- of the New York Times for Americans and The Times of Englishpeople. Its reports are subject to heavy censorship as well, as the majority stakeholder in the organization is the Egyptian Government. ‘Al-Ahram’ means ‘The Pyramids’ in Arabic.
Grunge is a genre of music that developed in Seattle in the nineties. Its sound was brewed in garages, with a raw, guitar driven sound layered with feedback. The grunge aesthetic was typified by young adults with long, shaggy hair, and an unkempt sense of dressing.
The part of Aliya’s mother Hala is played by
Al-Ahram
Arabic
Grunge
Hala
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 3
INT. Aliya’s House - Day
Aliya is in a webcam conversation with her mother. They speak in Arabic. The video feed is visible over her shoulder. A mirror behind the laptop shows Aliya's face.
English is the first, and Arabic is the second language featured in the film, which has a total five languages in all- Hindi, Marathi and Swedish follow later in the story.
Aliya's Mother
Webcam Conversation
Market
Market
Street Photography
Scene 4
EXT. Market - Day
Aliya is walking through a market. The passing sounds of the city around her are evident - traffic, broken conversations, hawkers, a TV set, a Hindi song etc. She stops to feel a pile of books. She listens to the mechanised instructions from her camera and clicks a couple of pictures, framing instinctively.
The Blind Photographer’s Toolkit
Item No. 4: Camera Setting Reader
This nifty little gadget reads out the changing camera settings through a voice function. It was created especially for the film by Production Designers Pooja Shetty and Rakesh Yadav. They used the outer shell of an earphone and half the body of a USB stick to create Aliya’s Camera Setting Reader.
Screenplay Notes:
Extreme Closeup of Aliya’s Left Ear
Scene 4A
EXT. Wood Workshop- Day
At the wood workshop sounds of carpentry - hammering, drilling, sanding and carving - predominate. Here too, she navigates via sound and clicks as the camera instructions take her from one worker to the next.
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 4B
INT. Café- Day
A fly rubs its legs together.
Aliya sits at her table idly.
The fly explodes into a tiny fire ball between the grids of a bug zapper. (aka electrical discharge insect control system)
CAMERA V.O
Five point four. One - one thousandth.
The camera shutter clicks.
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 5
INT. Apartment Corridor- Day
Aliya runs her left hand along a wall, feeling it's cracks, cavities and blemishes. A Guide Cane hangs off her wrist.
Carefully walking up a flight of stairs, she speaks with an old man, whom she calls ‘Uncle’.
In colloquial English, as it is spoken all over India, it is custom to refer to much older acquaintances, and even strangers as ‘Uncle’ and ‘Aunty’.
Thick Bamboo poles are quite commonly used to prop up crumbling walls and roofs of buildings in India.
Director’s Notes:
AG:“The moment were she’s at the window, staring at the sun. She feels the sun on her face, in that she almost hears the sun. One of the instructions to Gabor was that we needed to hear the sun. Just imagine trillions of nuclear explosions happening far away. What would that rumble sound like? You can hear the sun in this part of the film. There is a very slight low decibel sound.”
“The sound design of the film is by Gabor Erdelyi. I’ve been a huge fan of his work. He did work on Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse, which for me is one of the greatest cinematic experiences I’ve had in life. I was incredibly inspired by his work. One day, on a spur I decided to give him a shout out on FB. Found him online, sent him some bits of the film, which he loved thankfully. He responded in 6 hours, and said he’s on- he would work on the film! It was a great privilege; his work meant so much to us. And that’s how the sound design process began, which was very elaborate and painstaking. We’d shot the entire film in sync sound, on real locations. Most of the sound was very challenging to use.”
Gabor Erdelyi
Screenplay Notes:
"Aliya is seated by a window, drenched in sunlight, save for the shadows the window grills cast on her face. She stares directly up at the source."
In this particular scene, as Aliya feels the bright sunlight on her face, she also hears a sound. To accentuate the relationship between sound and light/heat in Aliya’s sensory system, there is a low rumbling sound as the sonic background. This is the sound of the sun, which Aliya and the viewer ‘hear’, as the bright, warm sunlight falls on her face, her eyes closed gently.
Anand and Sound Designer Gabor Erdelyi used actual recordings by astrophysicists, of the sound the sun makes through its electromagnetic fields.
A Sample Recording of the Sun's Sound
Shadows
Sonora Solaris,
Or,
The Sound of the SunIn the vacuities of outer space, where matter is absent, sound cannot travel through the void. None of the sounds from outer space can be heard by us directly. Strangely enough, when it comes to actually trying to hear the sounds of outer space, we are in a situation akin to that of Aliya. We are missing a sense- in this particular case- Hearing. The story of how scientists have managed to record these sounds shows how technology can truly overcome sense-disabilities, augment our cognition, aid the process of intuitive thinking and function as an outer skin- a sixth sense.
We tend to think of the Sun, all-powerful as it may be in our imaginations, as a silent sort of fellow. The Sun, however is actually a celestial trumpet player, one of great endurance too, for it is endlessly playing out a heavenly harmony, on a low-tenor like scale.
The big yellow ball in the sky is quite a heavy player, weighing in at roughly two nonillion kilograms (a nonillion is one followed by thirty zeroes). Its core is the largest, most intense spot of thermogenesis in our planetary system, producing heat and light at astonishing rates. The sun is also surrounded by large loops of electromagnetic field lines. These lines can be imagined as ‘strings’ emerging from and surrounding a spherical musical instrument.
The surface of the Sun is one of the most chaotic places in the universe. A dazzling range of blasts, flare-ups, gas-storms and plasma explosions have been occurring perpetually on it, for billions of years. As these turbulences launch waves vertically opposite to the surface, the electromagnetic field lines get ‘plucked’ like the strings of a musical instrument. Ripple-like sound waves also course across the surface, and inwards, through the mantle and towards the inner core of the sun.
The patterns of wave-formation are also similar to wind instruments, so the sun plays both the harp and the trombone.
By measuring the frequencies of the waves, we are able to visualize and map out the shapes of the ripples and waves of energy. The frequency at which these large waves vibrate is too low for the human auditory range, so around forty days of sound is compressed into a few seconds. The sound is a low, rumbling one, the musical output of the Big Yellow Musician in the Sky.
A Shout-out for Sound,
A Call for CollaborationFrom Mumbai to Budapest.When imagining the sound design of the film, Anand had many ideas about how to go about it. The soundscape of the film had to be very precise, yet very natural. This was especially true in Aliya’s story, for one of the aspirations of the film was to use sound to distill the essence of portraying a blind person’s sensory experiences on film.
Among contemporary world cinema, Anand had always been an admirer of the Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s films, especially Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). He was particularly impressed by the sound design of Tarr’s 2011 film ‘The Turin Horse’- a film Anand identifies as one of the greatest cinematic experiences of his life. The sound designer of all these films was Gabor Erdelyi Jr., who had been a sound designer in Hungary for more than 15 years, working on numerous short and feature films.
In the spirit of true, free-flowing, border-smashing, almost synchronous collaboration that has typified the manner in which he made this film over four long, arduous years, Anand reached out to Gabor online. He sent him a message and some parts of the film. A reply arrived from Gabor six hours later- he had found the footage mesmerizing and would work on the film. The sync sound recorded on-location during the shoot was difficult to use, and needed to be worked on. And so began a detailed and painstaking, yet very rewarding process of Sound Design.
Sound Design
Sound of the Sun
Sunlight
Color-Reading Device
Aliya’s Arsenal.
The Blind Photographer’s Toolkit
Item No. 2: Color Reading Device.
This is a handheld, battery-operated device used by both blind and color-blind people. Many such devices also serve as light probes, helping the user detect sources of light. The devices can distinguish between many shades and tints using frequency-detection, and announce the color through a voice function. Today, many smartphone apps are available that serve the same purpose, using the phone’s camera.
This particular device was written about without knowing it existed. During pre-production, it was found at the Helen Keller Institute, who lent it to the crew along with other equipment.
The device is widely available and commonly used. Some models include the Brytech Colorimeter, the Colorino Talking Color Identifier (by the American Foundation for the Blind), the CR-14 Color Reader and CR-10 Colorimeter BY Konica, among many others.
Cast
Director’s Notes:
Most of the parts in the film are played by non-actors. People who wouldn’t identify themselves as actors, or acting as their main profession. That gives a very unique quality to the nature of acting in the film, to the atmosphere in the film. It becomes much easier to believe people who are not phrasing their dialogue in a certain structure, not using techniques. Because techniques, however subtle, are becoming increasingly visible to us as audiences.
Non Actors
Relatives
The cast of Ship of Theseus is filled with a number of people from various professions, but would not identify as actors. A number of ‘non-actors’ were used to portray the regular people that the three protagonists interact with.
In this particular scene, the gentleman whom Aliya calls ‘Uncle’, the kid playing chess with him, and the lady in house are Mr. Narendra Shah, Mrs. Chitra Shah and Manan Shah respectively. They are Anand’s relatives.
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 5C
EXT. Sky Walk – Night
Aliya feels her way along a sky walk as traffic passes by below her.
Skywalk
Aliya's Apartment
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 6
INT. Aliya's House – Day
Aliya comes through the front door. She feels for the door key and pulls it out of the lock.
Sitting on a shelf, she takes off her sling bag and sets it down. The shelf slopes upward with a series of hooks protruding off the edge. She fixes her cane on one of the hooks. Two small showpiece lanterns - with orange and blue glass dangle nearby.
She walks to her bedroom.
Contact Lenses
Director's Notes AG: "The idea was that, throughout the film she would only be wearing these opaque lenses. But there was a problem. One was that the opaque cornea lenses had around 80% opacity, so she could just see moving shapes and light in front of her. It proved difficult during outdoor shoots. The trick was that those are her natural eyes and then she puts on normal lenses over them. In the film, Aida has three sets of corneas. One is the natural cornea, seen only when she get her sight back, one is the opaque corneas at home, one is a set of lenses she wears when she goes out, over her opaque lenses. For production these brown lenses were placed over her eyes. When she’s taking off the lenses (with her back to the camera she’s actually putting on the opaque lens. "
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 6A
INT. Aliya’s Bedroom
Taking out her contact lenses, she carefully places them in a case that balances on her lap. The lenses jitter under the fluid as she screws on the cover. She picks up a bottle of lens fluid and turns around. The true colour of her unseeing eyes are revealed - the dead grey seen under the slit lamp at the clinic.
The contact lenses were created by Dr. Yogesh Shah, who also plays the doctor in the film. It took him 3 months of research and designing to create two sets of lenses that would create the impression of an eye that had been damaged by a cornea infection. Dr. Shah has said that he took enough care to detail the lens, that any doctor who would look at it, would be able to diagnose the exact ailment that caused Alia to lose her eyesight.
In this particular scene, Aliya seems to be taking off the cosmetic lens her character wears, revealing her character’s actual eyes. The actress Aida-el-Kashef is actually putting on the white-streaked lens, covering up her real brown eyes.
Dr. Yogesh Shah
Photography Exhibition
Scene 7
INT. Exhibition- Day
Vinay escorts a blind-folded woman into a cordoned off section of the exhibition hall shrouded in black cloth. She enters to hear sounds of traffic and feels her way past a cycle and an auto-rickshaw before lightly bumping into a wheelbarrow and soon after, a lamp-post.
At the end of the installation she takes off her blindfold and the photograph with the coughing man reveals itself. Vinay meets her at the exit. She stays, transfixed by the picture.
The photography exhibition was designed in detail, and set up as a real-life photography exhibition by Aliya Kamal, a blind artist from Egypt. It was created to provide, for a participant, a complete, immersive experience into Aliya’s sensory world, beginning with the participant being blindfolded and led through a space by Vinay. The sounds of blaring Bombay traffic envelop the participant, who can now only see darkness. She slowly tries to make her way in the re-created simulation of the moment of photographic capture.
As she reaches the end of the section, gingerly stepping forward, with a quick snap- her blindfold is taken off, and she sees the photograph- visualized, clicked and framed in front of her.
This particular schedule was shot in 2010, at the X Labs in South Bombay. It was quite an important part of the film, and resulted in some key sequences, including shots that were used in the final trailer. It also entailed a pleasant co-incidence, resulting in the joining of another member to the team. Kuldeep Shah was an acquaintance of Anand’s and had recently left his commodity-trading job to pursue his passions- photography and videography. On the first day of the shoot, he happened to be in the area, finishing a chore on the ground floor of the building. He heard that a photography exhibition was being held upstairs and decided to take a look at it. He met Anand there, and as Hello’s were said and news was exchanged, a natural clicking together of needs and requirements happened. The DoP Pankaj Kumar was looking for someone who could assist him, and Kuldeep joined the team, taking up a wide variety of job roles. From arranging early morning Idli breakfasts for the unit, and creating schedules with the Production team, to shooting the film with the DoP team. Belonging to the Gujarati Jain community himself, he was deeply steeped in the religion during his younger days, and has a fascinating, powerful story of his tryst with spirituality. He also plays one of the monks in the second story.
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 7A
INT. Exhibition- Another Section
A group of blind men run their fingers on an etched photograph. A guide brings the picture to life through sign language. Not a word is spoken. In the background a young man speaks with Aliya.
The second part of the exhibition is tactile- the participant touches the photograph, running his fingertips over the contours of the image, as an image forms in his mind.
In this scene, the blind attendees are students from the Helen Keller Institute.
Tactile
Analogy
Black and White
Cornea Infection
Interview
On the ‘Why’ from ‘Why Photography?’ Journalism, and the manner of journalists, like most things in India reflect the warped state of society here. Though one would refrain from making broad, sweeping generalizations, most journalists either ask side-splittingly inane, unrelated questions or simply state their opinions and ask for if the interview subject agrees or disagrees. The ideal framework for interview questions is called ‘The Five W’s and One H’- who, what, when, where, why and how. It is quite old, one that has its roots in the very origins of journalism as a modern practice. Using these Five words, and a combination of them, it is possible for one to excavate the truth from any person in any situation.
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
--- Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
This journalist seems well-versed with the W’s and H; as she asks a simple, succinct but precise question - ‘Why photography?’, that goes to the very origins of Alia’s quest. Standing there in the exhibition space, surrounded by all her work, the place teeming with people who are engaging with it, we see Aliya in a genuine moment of happiness, as she reflects upon her journey.
On the ‘Photography’ from ‘Why Photography?’In this particular scene, we get the first hint of what Alia’s past must have been like. She lost her eyesight to a cornea infection, and began using the camera as a tool to first document and archive her school, home and family life; for a time in some distant imagined future when she would get her eyesight back. As she tells us, her photographic tinkering began with a desire to capture and curate the world; to compensate her experience, despite her missing sense of ‘Sight’. Though the eye’s sensory experiences are not within her reach, using a combination of augmented technologies, she manages enhance her sense of ‘Vision’. As this process continued, and she discovered new techniques, it reached a stage of maturation, where she now began to use her photographic skills to go a step beyond simply recording her surroundings. Instead she would engage with her environment using human-created machines, and her own intuitive sense of aesthetic; in effect subverting her ‘disability’ in precisely the manner she desired.
Patrick Suskind
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 7B
INT. Exhibition - Another Section
Aliya is interviewed by a female REPORTER who holds a recorder out in her right hand and a page of questions in her left. A photographer clicks them, exploring every possible angle. They stand by a large window that breaks the line of framed photographs.
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The interviewer is played by Megha Ramaswamy, a writer and filmmaker from Mumbai, India. Megha, whose many talents include a splendid flair for the English Language, and a singular sense of visual aesthetic also subtitled early cuts of the film; and speckled the color-palette of the film with Blue. As the end credits roll, her name appears thrice- as ‘Interviewer in the Exhibition’, for ‘Subtitles’ and quite simply- ‘Blue’.
Smelling Suskind:
The Story of the PerfumerPatrick Suskind is a reclusive author from Germany, whose 1985 novel, ‘Perfume: Story of a Murderer’; is widely regarded as one of the best popular novels of the last five decades. A period novel, it is set in the dark alleyways of 18th Century Paris, it tells the macabre story of Grenouille (French for Frog), a perfumer’s apprentice who begins to murder women in his quest for the perfect scent. The novel, with its fast-paced plotting, and dense, repetitive prose is soaked in an air of the Highly Absurd, and aims to show the ‘Dark Side of the Enlightenment’. The book also becomes an excursion into the world of Olfaction, as Paris is described in a manner evocating smells, rather than sights or sounds. To write the novel, Suskind immersed himself in Perfume Sciences for years; studying the chemistry of perfumes and training his own sense of smell. He would zoom around on a Vespa, geared up in helmet and goggles, driving through perfume estates in the South of France, sniffing everywhere; much like his protagonist. The book, though quite ghastly at a literal level, is also a darkly comic experience. There is a tone of sardonic humor throughout; as if Suskind were barely containing a loud guffaw; an element which must have resonated with the young Aliya, for she finds the character of Grenouille amusing.
On the ‘Why’ from ‘Why Photography?’ Journalism, and the manner of journalists, like most things in India reflect the warped state of society here. Though one would refrain from making broad, sweeping generalizations, most journalists either ask side-splittingly inane, unrelated questions or simply state their opinions and ask for if the interview subject agrees or disagrees. The ideal framework for interview questions is called ‘The Five W’s and One H’- who, what, when, where, why and how. It is quite old, one that has its roots in the very origins of journalism as a modern practice. Using these Five words, and a combination of them, it is possible for one to excavate the truth from any person in any situation.
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
--- Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
This journalist seems well-versed with the W’s and H; as she asks a simple, succinct but precise question - ‘Why photography?’, that goes to the very origins of Alia’s quest. Standing there in the exhibition space, surrounded by all her work, the place teeming with people who are engaging with it, we see Aliya in a genuine moment of happiness, as she reflects upon her journey.
On the ‘Photography’ from ‘Why Photography?’ In this particular scene, we get the first hint of what Alia’s past must have been like. She lost her eyesight to a cornea infection, and began using the camera as a tool to first document and archive her school, home and family life; for a time in some distant imagined future when she would get her eyesight back. As she tells us, her photographic tinkering began with a desire to capture and curate the world; to compensate her experience, despite her missing sense of ‘Sight’. Though the eye’s sensory experiences are not within her reach, using a combination of augmented technologies, she manages enhance her sense of ‘Vision’. As this process continued, and she discovered new techniques, it reached a stage of maturation, where she now began to use her photographic skills to go a step beyond simply recording her surroundings. Instead she would engage with her environment using human-created machines, and her own intuitive sense of aesthetic; in effect subverting her ‘disability’ in precisely the manner she desired.
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 8
EXT. Road- Day
Aliya is walking down a road with the help of her cane. Her camera hangs off her neck as she grips it firmly by the lens for additional support. A fence made of twigs and thin branch stands on a pile of rock to her right. She stops and places her hand on a rock.
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 8A
EXT. Duck Farm- Montage
The lady guides Aliya through her yard. She holds up a laundry line, allowing Aliya to pass through.
Aliya runs her hand along a cage. Inside, a white rat scurries about.
She walks gingerly through a pile of shifty rocks.
Her hands skim a laundry line of bright yellow sheets, patterned with flowers following a mildly geometric design.
The tips of her fingers brush down the crisp surface of some thatch.
She cautiously dips her middle finger into a stagnant pond, sending delicate ripples across it's leaf strewn surface, and almost immediately retracts it.
Aliya takes photos while the lady splashes water from the mug. A large duck flaps its wings at the edge of the pond. Faintly, the mechanical call of her camera settings can be heard.
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 9
INT. Aliya’s Bedroom- Day
Vinay and Aliya lean back on the bed. He goes through her pictures and describes them. She chews on some food and listens.
Gable Roof
When two roof sections are slanted across each other, the wall that fills the triangular space is called a gable. The word originates in the Old Germanic ‘Gablaz’ which referred to the fork between the two crossed timbers of a roof-tree.
The radio show Aliya is listening to is NPR’s ‘This American Life’ hosted by the American Radio Broadcaster, Ira Glass.
Mumbai Taxi
NPR
Radio
This American Life
As soon as the cab halts, she crosses the street. She stops at the median and starts clicking. On the other side of the road two men try and grapple each other while quarreling loudly.
Marathi
Men Arguing
Monkeys
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 11
EXT. Ground- Day
Aliya photographs a troop of monkeys who are jumping around, chattering loudly and playfully fighting.
Camera instructions. Click.
Argument
Kitchen
She goes into a room and picks out an etching, very deliberately running her fingers over it.
Call from Hospital
Childhood Memory
Swan Cart
Webcam Conversation
Mirror
Restored Vision
Scene 14
INT. Hospital- Day
A large mirror is brought before Aliya. Her Father, Vinay and a Doctor are looking at her as she opens her eyes slowly at the doctor's instructions.
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Contrary to the depiction of cornea transplants in popular cinema, only one eye is operated upon at a time. It is only after the first graft is accepted by the body and mind, that the second cornea is grafted.
Despite her tears, Aliya laughs.
She looks down at the laptop beside her. Her mother and sister smile back.
Memory Room
See, Memory
Exploring Aliya’s Memory RoomThe warm, jute-floored Memory Room was an important part of the production design, as Aliya experiences a literal catharsis of emotion, as more than a dozen years of memories are now reconciled with her archives of them. She goes through numerous artefacts from her past- illustrated storybooks she had made before the infection, photographs she took to document her environment and videos she shot to engage with it; finally ‘seeing’ her work and re-living her past.
The multi-colored Zebra on the wall in the background is made up of several materials, the idea being that Vinay made it for Aliya. She would first to experience it through her sense of touch, and then after the surgery, see it with her eyes. For this, production designers Pooja and Rakesh used beads, buttons, broken bangle pieces, metal nuts and washers, double-sided tape, toothpicks, and a variety of ephemera to create a tactile work of art, complete with a broom for a tail.
The building where Aliya photographs the old man is in Ghatkopar, where Anand grew up in the eighties and nineties. The old man was their neighbor; he still lives there, and suffers from mild schizophrenia.
The window where Aliya photographs the women is a place of great remembrance for Anand, it was a place for meals when he was very young.
Old Man
Abandoned Ruin
Directors Notes:
AG: Aliya is looking for inspiration in a number of places, but she can't seem to find it. The thrill of taking photographs is seemingly not the same anymore.
Kanheri Caves
Kanheri Caves are a group of rock-cut monuments on the Western outskirts of Mumbai. The reliefs and sculptures in over a hundred caves are dated between the first and tenth century AD. There are numerous paintings and carvings in both the living quarters (Viharas) as well as prayer halls (Chaityas) for the monks.The word Kanheri is a modification of ‘Krishnagiri’, which means ‘Black Mountain’ in Sanskrit. The inscriptions are in Brahmi and Devnagri scripts.
Scene 17D
INT. An abandoned ruin- Day
Aliya explores an abandoned space. Sunlight floods in through the windows. She is flanked by antiquated stone pillars. She takes a few pictures and studies the results.
She sits down cross-legged, looks around, and glances down at her camera.
Analysis Paralysis
Centipede's Dilemma
"The Centipede's Dilemma" is a short poem that has lent its name to a psychological effect called the centipede syndrome. It occurs when a normally automatic or unconscious activity is disrupted by active reflection upon it. A similar state is ‘Analysis Paralysis’, which occurs as a result of overthinking certain activities, that would otherwise be carried out without conscious thought. The original poem, which was published in Katherine Craster’s ‘Pinafore Poems’ in 1871, is as follows:
A centipede was happy – quite!
Until a toad in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?"
This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
Early Morning
Maitreya walks to Court
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 23
INT. Monastery- Early Morning
It is still dark out as Maitreya wakes up to the sound of rain and rumbling thunder. He is attired in nothing but a white dhoti. There are several other monks around him, fast asleep.
Standing up, he gathers his bed sheet and lightly brushes it off with a soft broom. Maitreya then unfurls the fabric and wraps it around his torso.
He folds his thin mattress and places it aside, before heading out.
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The fictitious religion in the film is primarily based on Jainism, with elements from Buddhism and other ‘nastika’ (atheistic) schools of thought in Indian spirituality. The white clothes of the monks are modelled on the Shwetambar (‘clad in White’) sect of the Jains.
The earliest Jain Sramanas were strict adherents of ahimsa (non-violence), which is the basic tenet of their faith. In pre-scientific times, a broom was the monk’s constant companion, as he would sweep the floor wherever he went before stepping on it, ensuring that he killed as few microbial organisms as possible. This quaint practice may no longer make sense in light of modern science, but that curious artefact- the broom itself known as the Rajoharan, has sustained itself for thousand of years, as a symbol of their belief in the faith.
The broom seen in the film is a modified version of the traditional design.
Barefoot walking is another practice that is integral to the wandering ascetic’s faith. Serving the aforementioned principle of non-violence, walking without protection is also a constant reminder of the severe hardships, both physical and mental that one must embrace while on the path to spiritual liberation.
Walking towards Enlightenment:
The Ascetic Traditions in Ancient India
In the Indian sub-continent, the tradition of the renouncer is an ancient one; with references to the earliest ascetics dating back to pre-Vedic times in the first millennium BCE. The ‘Brahmana’ way of life was the norm in mainstream society- inner peace was to be reached by studying texts and performing rituals. The ‘Sramana’ way of life emerged as an anti-thesis to this lifestyle, the path to spiritual freedom was instead seen as a difficult, arduous one; and could be reached only by giving up on worldly pleasures and embracing a life of severe austerities.
The tradition led to the emergence of three great schools of thought- Jainism, Buddhism and Ajivika. All of them were atheistic in outlook and rejected the concepts of wealth and property.The word sramana is derived from the Sanskrit ‘sram’, which means ‘to exert effort’. And indeed, the Sramanas worked quite hard in their quest for liberation- as wandering ascetics they never stayed in a single place for more than a few weeks. They were constantly walking, the practice etched into their minds, lifestyles and philosophies.
rain
umbrella
Centipede
Screenplay Notes:
Scene 25
EXT. Court- Day
A centipede crawls determinedly along the floor. Quick feet step back and forth it's either direction. Some miss stepping on the insect by the narrowest of margins. A hint of a bare foot as the corner of a stamp paper enters the frame. The centipede callously climbs onto the document.
The affidavit ramps out over a leaf as the centipede perfunctorily steps over the threshold.
This is the second insect featured in the film, the first being a fly in the first story, which gets zapped. After being referred to in the first story by Aliya when she reads 'The Centipede's Dilemma' aloud, a centipede makes an actual appearance in the film. As a character, this one has a fate quite opposite to the dearly departed fly, for Maitreya saves its life from the barrage of oncoming feet in the Mumbai Court.
As Sugar Melts on the Tongue:
The Hard-Living Hedonists of Ancient IndiaThough only a few fragments of their writings have survived, there is a strong sense of seeking and celebrating pleasure; with a clear advocacy of Dionysian debaucheries. Many of the sources are also texts from competing philosophies, which tend to be biased and exaggerated. One among the four traditional Nastika (Atheist) schools, it disappeared, soon followed by Ajivika, while Jainism and Buddhism flourished. The Charavakas must have been quite influential though, for we have a number of texts devoting space to harshly criticizing and belittling their beliefs and lifestyles.
The name Charavaka itself means ‘Sweet Talking’ or ‘Sugar Tongued’. Their philosophy lacked in many areas of thought- they had rather incomplete explanations of epistemology and ontology, instead using a clever trick of negation- mostly refuting other schools of thought. The practitioners of this ancient philosophy were smooth wielders of verbal weaponry- articulate men and women who knew how to sell their philosophies. The willing masses were eager to buy too; they were tired of the clearly visible corruption in religious instiutions and systems, which had leeched the spirituality out of religion.
A particularly evocative fragment of the Charavakas:
Lead life happily as long as you live.
No one can escape from Vision of Death.
When once this body is burned to ashes,
Where from does it return again? The Charavakas seem to have been excellent communicators. Using metaphors that evoke a great sense of hilarity to even to readers of today, they rudely rejected the principles of other schools of thought, chiefly the Brahmins, whose hypocrisies are called out on in quite colourful language. The priestly class is severely criticized for usurping of spirituality and religion, to satisy their greed for money and power. They had created for themselves a little but robust economic circle promoting ritual-based dogma- rituals which they would charge large amounts of money and offerings to perform. Other fragments from these lost Hedonists of yore advise the spiritual seeker to enjoy the sensual pleasures of life to the fullest. What other way to peace, the Charavakas argued than to think abut abstract ideals, while enjoying all the material joys of life?
This group has fascinated people for centuries, having attained mythic status, owing to their history being lost. The germ of an idea that a single founder named Charavaka would have been a Dionysian Buddha has even inspired a fictional novel. The endearing manner of their language, and the reckless abandon they espouse must have appealed to the young Madhav, prompting a change of name to Charavaka, and a change of worldview to scepticism, rationality and a youthful proclivity to pleasure-seeking.
Charvaka's Name
Director's Notes:AG: "There were lots of rehearsals. But, also in Neeraj’s case, because he plays an academic, I was willing to believe that he speaks in that language, you know...because if I was to engage in a philosophical debate, I would be using those words, all of us would be using a syntax of that nature. And the only thing that needed to be done was to pop in a little bit of realism into it, to put in rightly-placed fumbles, and rightly-placed overlaps, and rightly-positioned misconstruing of words. Just to inject realism into it, there was some kind of structuring that had to be done. But once Neeraj had started preparing for the part, he and Vinay had long discussions, long conversations of the nature that are now in the film, with each other, with me, every day, through the rehearsals. So they were, off-screen also, beginning to talk in that language."
“The auditioning process for Maitreya’s part went on for many, many months. It wasn’t a typical audition where you give an actor who has walked in, said some lines and gauge on that basis. It wasn’t possible to do that. So it had to be a very engaging audition. We had to request all the actors who were interested in playing that part that they’d have to invest a lot in a long process and in the end they might not even get the part. Only those who were willing to do that were auditioning. I was open to anyone. Academics, intellectuals, non-actors, anyone."
"I’d remembered Neeraj from a production of Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencratz and Guildenstern are dead’. I’d seen 12 years back. It was a wonderful performance where Hamlet (Neeraj) wears tall stilts, a mask and walks on stage, and talks in an extremely seductive voice. When auditioning I knew we had to contact him and he understood where this person is coming from, how difficult it is to perform. It is one thing to watch a film and understand the character, another to understand it and then perform. There were long discussions on craftsmanship, on approach to a character, on acting, on small improvisations, debates and rituals I’d engage the actors in."
"For example, one process was walking. I’d give them their lines and make them go for long walks with me around the neighbourhood and the city, and then see their body language and suggest changes and variations accordingly. I was seeing how malleable they were to get into character. Right from auditioning Neeraj, to him preparing for the role, the whole process took around a year. He read books from Bodhmala to Shrimad Rajchandra, from Buddhist ideas to Peter Singer. We would have long conversations and debates, throw the script aside and discuss some more. He went from being a carnivore to a vegetarian. He was so convinced about the discourse he was participating in, he transformed and internalized it. We practiced a lot of bare-feet walking. He changed his diet where he ate only greens and salads for almost 4 and half months.”
Dramatis Personae: The Parts and the Players.Maitreya is an erudite monk, part of a spiritual-atheist religious order that upholds a strict adherence to nonviolence. Though his faith prescribes isolation from society, its core teaching is of accepting all life forms as one’s extended self. Maitreya chooses to interpret this in an informed, practical manner and engages with the systems of his world. In a spirit of reform and revolution, he campaigns and advocates for animal rights through various campaigns. He tirelessly fights large pharmaceutical corporations to promote humane practices towards lab animals. A serious medical condition pushes him to question a long held ideology, forcing him to choose between principle and death.
Neeraj Kabi is a theatre director, actor and founder of the ‘Pravah Theatre Laboratory’ for performance, training and research. To familiarize himself with Maitreya’s worldviews, Neeraj delved into the philosophical works of Peter Singer and Shrimad Rajachandra. As he became familiar with Maitreya’s worldview, he found himself espousing the difficult principles that the ascetic lived by, and turned completely vegetarian. He lost seventeen kilos in preparation for the role through a rigorous physical and dietary regime.
Charavaka is a young lawyer, who has recently graduated and is working in Sunip’s law firm. With a strong instinct for scepticism and inquiry, a jocular sense of humor and the occasional bout of cheekiness, Charavaka is quite well-informed and articulate. He also occasionally channels of his gifts of the gab on the stage, by writing and performing a stand-up comedy act.
He was originally named Madhav by his parents, who were presumably religious in a traditional way, worshippers of Vishnu belonging to the Vaishya clan perhaps; and named their son after the 12th Century dualist philosopher. Madhvacharya was one of the notable personalities in Indian spiritual thought, bringing about a new wave of religious practice, establishing ashrams and spreading his teachings all across the country. He prescribed ‘Bhakti’- a loving devotion to a Higher Diety as the path to salvation. Madhav took on his current moniker after reading the pithy aphorisms of the ancient skeptic-hedonist school of thought, Charavaka.
Vinay Shukla is a filmmaker based out of Mumbai. He has directed the short film, Bureaucracy Sonata and is currently co-directing a feature documentary, Proposition for a Revolution.
After several rehearsals, that were livened up by Vinay Shukla's constant barrage of jokes, this scene was shot in numerous angles, recreating it 26 times. The clips, in their raw look and sound, peppered with goofy antics by Vinay . and amused guffaws by Neeraj; bring out the unique chemistry between the two. They can be seen here:
https://pad.ma/grid/title/project==Ship_of_Theseus
Madhav
Madhvacharya
Mumbai High Court
Outside Courtroom
Blind Men and the Elephant
On Legalese,
or
Why Lawyers speak the way they do. Writ Petitions
A writ is a direction that the Court issues, which is to be obeyed by the authority/person to whom it is issued. A petition seeking issuance of a writ is a writ petition. In the first instance in the High Courts and the Supreme Court are writ petitions.
In this particular case, Maitreya has issued a writ petition to the Court, asking them to specifically instruct the management of a large pharmaceutical company to improve living conditions for their lab animals.
Public Interest Litigation
Article 34 of the Constitution provides a channel to serve as a simple means of legal recourse for an individual, and as an enabler of judicial campaigning for activists. In the chaotic public sphere of India, PIL’s have also been used for playing out the politics of power, for promoting private vested interests, for outright frivolous issues or simply as a tool for gathering media interest. Though Mr. Dastoor probably knows that Maitreya is pursuing the PIL out of purely ethical reasons, he is being a good lawyer to his clients, and using an old debating trick. He dismisses the matter as not worthy of discussion at all, accusing Maitreya and his team of misusing the PIL and wasting the Court’s time.
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My Learned Friend:
Of Cultured Colleagues and Well-read WorkmatesBoth the casual banter, and rigorous debate between the judge and the lawyers was greatly helped by a number of ‘dialogue jamming’ sessions with Sunip and several other lawyers.
In the wonderful linguistic landscape of Indian legal parlance, there are as many firmly defined terms as there are quaint expressions, archaic in their origin, but in continuous use even today. Its origins lie in a 12,000 page document written 65 years ago.
The Indian Constitution, the longest of any nation in the world; was written over two years, eleven months and seventeen days. It is one of the most fascinating documents in the world. Its authors were the Constituent Assembly- a collection of the brightest minds of the time. To write it, the CA freely ploughed the depths of nearly all the constitutions in the world. They adapted frameworks from them, applying their immense knowledge of Indian History, and experience of life in the country, to create a living document of ideas.
Two Hundred Years of British Colonial Rule had left deep imprints in the social structures of the country; and many of the laws in the Indian Constitution are modeled on archaic Victorian Laws that have been obsolete for decades now. The etiquette that is strictly followed in the Courtroom is also a vestige of the British Courts in Imperial times. A very similar set of words and sentences is used by British Barristers to this day.
When the legal profession took its modern form in the late 1800’s, complete with the stylish, elegant black coats and white neck-cuffs; it was still the nominal authority of the Crown under which the legal system functioned. It was customary to address the Judge as ‘Your Honor’ as a mark of respect to the Queen; and ‘My Lord/Ladyship’ in the case of a judge with a title. It was also a time when the community of lawyers was quite small, everyone knew each other, and most of them were friends who immensely respected each other. Their courtroom manner, as a result was extremely civil, no matter how fiery and confrontational their debates were. They maintained this through a highly formal manner of speaking, but as applied to rather personal and endearing words. Colleagues would always be referred to as ‘My Friend’, ‘My Dear Friend’ and ‘My Good Friend’. The practice continued as the community grew, and it became a symbolic phrase, reminding everyone sitting in the courtroom of the continuity of the legal tradition, instilling a sense of kinship in the air.
“My Learned Friend is not properly instructed” is a stock phrase that can be heard in its exact form in courtrooms all over Britain and India. It has a slightly longer, and more technical version too- “That submission by my learned Friend is perhaps not borne out by the records”.
This code of speaking also allowed some outlets for just a tiny bit of emotion. In the case of an interruption, an amusingly curt couple of lines are sanctioned for use. A somewhat agitated lawyer may direct a small barb at his colleague- “My learned friend ought to allow me to finish” or “I am sure my Learned Friend will have his turn”. And needless to say, as is evident in the scene, the delivery of the line would have to be in as expressionless and deadpan a manner as can be mustered!
Screenplay Notes:
The Court is in session.
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Creating the Court:
The Courtroom- as a public institution, as an physical repository of ideas, and as a stadium for dialectic and debate, is one of the most impressive achievements of modern civilization. It is an intricate cultural construct- of philosophies, principles, and the uniquely human instinct for realpolitik. One can step into the busy environs of a courtroom in any nation, and come to deep insights into how that nation functions. Indian Courtrooms have a particularly unique air, one that is considerably Disney-fied in most popular depictions of courts. Generally housed in Heritage Buildings, they are nebulae of slow chaos- teeming with fixers, journalists, and lawyers of all types; the cases themselves creaking along the giant bureaucratic processes of the Indian Judiciary.
Production Designers Pooja and Rakesh were keen to bring out the stoic dignity, the mundane physicality and crowded bustle of the Indian Courtroom. They created the set in an empty hall with high ceilings. Filling the place with old, creaky wooden furniture, numerous bundles of books, courtroom files and legal papers, the distinctive atmosphere of an Indian court is recreated in this scene, snoozing attendant included.
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Animal Testing in India:
The issue of animal testing is discussed in the Constitution under the ‘The Drugs and Cosmetic Act of 1940’- a six hundred page document has very few guidelines on the ethical treatment on animals. Needless to say, bloated Indian Bureaucracies have kept the rules mostly restricted to the page, as profit-hungry companies bend the system on a number of counts- the number of animals used, the facilities provided to them, as well as the actual reporting of these numbers. These basic guidelines have been severely violated by companies throughout the last six decades.
On the issue of Animal Rights, the Indian public sphere has been impressively active. Over the last six decades, animal rights activists have carried out sustained campaigns to amend the Act, proposing to add more provisions that would promote more empathetic attitudes towards lab animals.
As is presciently presented as Maitreya’s appeal to the Court, in 2014 the Indian government banned the testing of animals for cosmetic products. The law was further strengthened in 2015, which extended the ban to ingredients used in cosmetics, in addition to banning the import of any animal-tested cosmetics.
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Three Thousand is a Crowd
On passenger densities in Mumbai Locals
The Mumbai Suburban Railway is the busiest rapid transit system in the world. It achieves this somewhat dubious distinction through its 2,342 train services that carry 7.5 million commuters per day with an annual ridership of 2.64. With such large numbers in play, overcrowding is a major problem. At peak hours, a train with capacity of 1700 can carry close to 4,500 passengers; resulting in an average of 15 people per square meter.
In the field of Transport Economics, there is a term called Crush Load, which refers to the maximum capacity of a moving vehicle. Mr. Dastoor’s clever quip does have a wry truth behind it. It is a true testament to the overcrowding of Mumbai trains that after these numbers emerged in 2007, experts have coined the term ‘Super Dense Crush Load’!
These dynamics make the train journeys uncomfortable and dangerous, but the numbers themselves turn the inside of a Mumbai Local into a bustling hub of human activity, a moving, commuting public sphere unto itself
Director’s Notes:
“I met Abhay Mehta, he is a whistleblower in the nineties. He was a scientist, a researcher at MIT and he turned to expose the whole power project Enron India. Then he wrote a book called Power Play and he has a website called
altindia.net. If you recover the site at
wayback.net and you see the documents, you will see all of it marked as ‘Top Secret’! So I got the opportunity to work with him at 16. I was also into web design so I got the opportunity to work in web design and make a whistle blowing website.”
"The monk is a composite of all my heroes—Mahatma Gandhi, his spiritual teacher- the Jain philosopher Shrimad Rajchandra, the activist Abhay Mehta and the environmentalist Satish Kumar; wuth some parts of myself making up the character. Their ideas are incredibly flawed, but I have great empathy for all attempts to find a unifying theory, for all who have taken a shot at meaning even though they might fail."
The character of Maitreya is based on a number of personalities. Over the course of the annotations, each of them will be introduced; their thought and lives will be delved into, showcasing their unique contributions to the world.
Abhay MehtaIn this particular case, a Jain monk and a righteous group of lawyers take on a pharmaceutical giant, highlighting the plight of lab animals, demanding more humane treatment towards them. Maitreya’s case, as reasonable as it may sound, is quite a mammoth task; considering the power, wealth and might of the pharma industry.
Scouring through legal history gives us very few examples of a single person taking on a giant corporation and coming out unscathed and victorious. It is rife with stories though, of people who, simply by telling their stories have helped raise a voice against injustice, and inspiring others to do so. Abhay Mehta’s is one such story. In the nineties, the Enron-Dhabol Power Project was one of the most notorious episodes in the world, exposing a nexus of corporate greed and vested interests. Abhay has produced the most comprehensive report of the episode, in a book entitled ‘Powerplay’
When he was sixteen, Anand met Abhay Mehta, an independent energy analyst and freelance journalist. Abhay had trained as a Molecular Biologist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University. Returning to India in 1993, he had become interested in the economics of the Enron-Dhabol Power project. The first foreign funded power project in India, there were a number of underhanded dealings happening during the negotiations among the politico-industrial complex; the Maharashtra Government and Enron officials. At great personal risk, Abhay swung into his role of investigative journalist and began compiling documents, trying to uncover the truth and bring the illegitimate practices of the giant corporation and the govt. to public attention. Abhay was setting up the whistleblowing site
altindia.net, which Anand helped him design and build. Abhay later authored ‘Power Play’, a riveting book which serves as a singular source of information about the doomed project, and presents a narrative report of the entire episode.
Mumbai-based High Court lawyer Sunip Sen plays his namesake in the film. Sunip was the courtroom warrior in the Enron case, fighting alongside Abhay Mehta. Previously, he had also fought the case of “Indian Trade Unions and others v. Union of India and others”. Enron had placed all the leading lawyers in Mumbai and Delhi on retainer; and the petitioners approached Sunip for what would be one of the most significant PIL’s in recent history. The might of the Corporation won out in the end though, as the court ruled that all allegations brought by the union against Dabhol Power, the Maharashtra government and the Union of India were without merit. It decreed that the dealings were still valid. Enron escaped unscathed for its illegal conduct,and subsequently withdrew its deal with the government.
A Walk on Tulsi Pipe Road
Noor Rahat
Director's Notes: AG: "Well, I’d seen Sohum in a film called Baabar, and I knew he was an actor with great potential. So, when he came to meet me an audition for the part, I was already very curious, and he really outdid our expectations. He’s seen everything. He’s really had a vast journey. Along with casting some people I already knew, who would fit certain parts, one brief I had given to everyone working on the casting was to look for individuals who had made extremely grand journeys in life and not content themselves with finding actors. Because when you look for actors in the industry in Mumbai, you find a lot of aspirants who have moved there with a certain dream, but who have not had the privilege of grooming. So, they’re essentially young people who are spending enough time in gyms and dance classes, and not really had the opportunity to look at their craft. So, the brief was to not look for actors, but for people who have had interesting journeys, because they bring their journeys into their characters, somehow.I think that came through very well, especially with Neeraj Kabi and Sohum Shah, who really took ownership of their characters."
"When I was younger and rebelling our way into what I wanted to do, my friends and I imagined a future in which all of us would be married, have kids, and expose them to the greatest art and literature and philosophy. Then they would come to us and say, “We want to become bankers.” The stockbroker’s story is about that nightmare."
Hospital
Navin
Screenplay Notes:
NAVIN is sitting at a desktop computer in a hospital ward. He is in a green gown and matching green nurse mask. He tilts his neck to grip a cellphone between his head and left shoulder. He speaks in Hindi.
Sohum Shah
Stockbroker
The Parts and the Players:
Navin Parmani/ Sohum Shah
Navin is a young stockbroker- a modest, unassuming man who is deeply devoted to his job, deriving a silent, all-consuming pleasure from it. Consequently, Navin’s cultural interests are nearly non-existent; and his ethics are quite simplistic. This is much to the woe of his bohemian, intellectual, activist grandmother; who both berates and encourages him to explore the world and question his own values. Navin is especially averse to doing this, having never taken a liking to his own mother’s upbringing. We meet Navin at quite an eventful stage in his life, when he is in the hospital, just having received a kidney transplant. On his last night there, he hears a labourer’s family crying loudly in the corridor, setting off a series of curious, amusing, even confounding events that considerably changes him and his relationship with his grandmother.
---------------------------------------------------
Navin the stockbroker, as you see him in this scene; all decked up in the latest Indian Hospital line of Recovering Patient Couture, is played by Sohum Shah. He grew up in Sri Ganganagar, a small town in Rajasthan steeped in agriculture and trade, with extreme climate patterns- dry, scorching desert heat in the summer and sub-zero temperature in the winters. Cultural life in the town was limited to evening chatter over tea in the town square, celebrating festivals with the family; and watching Bollywood films- along with the occasional dubbed versions of Hollywood flicks. The youngest of five children, at the age of sixteen; he followed the tradition of joining the family business; a small convenience shop. Learning the ropes of commerce with due diligence, and spurred by an uncommonly vast vision for growth, he went on build numerous business organizations in the town, in commodities and real estate; including a large residential township. Having amassed a small fortune for himself throughout the fourteen years of constant work, the daily ebbs and tides of doing business began to bore him. He had always nurtured a dream of being an actor, which he took up full-time at the age of 27. Sohum has been widely lauded for the depth and honesty of his portrayal of Navin.
Anand based many of the character’s ticks and traits, right down to the nuances of Navin’s clothing, on a staggeringly populous Indian archetype- the diligent, entrepreneurial working trader. He sits behind a desk or a computer all day, occasionally stretching his legs to meet a client or two. Tea is sipped all day long, in the daily sucrose-fueled battle for higher profit margins. He juggles numbers in his head all day, computing profit and loss, buying and selling, risk and reward, growth and scale; focusing constantly on the bottom-line of money. The philosophies, worldviews and inner lives of these men (In the rigid social structures of India, especially in the communities that most of them belong to, there are very few women in this particular stream of vocation) are rarely explored in Indian cinema. In Navin’s case, this portrayal is layered by his direct conflict with Bhanu Ajji, and then further when he encounters the laborer family. For Shah, in addition to drawing elements from his own life, another reference for Navin was Mukesh Jain, a businessman friend of his; whom he recalls as being extremely empathetic and kind-hearted, quite prone to going out of his way for other people, he almost certainly would do in real-life, what Navin does in the film.
TV Channel
Amphibious Bicycle
Noor Rahat, the Water BicycleThe video playing on the television is of a man, Mohd Saidullah riding an amphibious bicycle through water. The machine is his own creation, and is named for his wife- Noor. In 1975, when a massive flood in his village in Bihar, caused many weeks of water-logging, the villagers had to take the boat every day to cross the river, after which they would also have to spend money on transportation there. A lifelong innovator, who had created many little devices to solve local problems, he hit upon the idea of a bicycle with air-floats on the bottom, and a rotating fan at the back. He has since then, received two grants to help him further improve the contraption. He continues to tinker and experiment every day; making his living from selling honey at the local market.
There are thousands of such stories, all across the nation, many of which have been extensively documented by the National Innovation Foundation, which is India's national initiative to strengthen the grassroots technological innovations and outstanding traditional knowledge. It was created in the year 2000 in collaboration with the Honeybee Network- a collective of innovators, farmers, scholars, academicians, policy makers, entrepreneurs and NGOs.
The video is an easter egg-of-sorts. The existence of such a channel itself, is a hopeful wish, imagining a world in which there is a dedicated TV channel showcasing frugal innovation from villages across the heartlands of India. It is also a wistful nod to the might over the masses, of the treacly-sweet, irresistible thrills of pop culture, as evidenced by the lurid music channel that Navin and Mannu flip to, paying no attention to Noor, as she is paddled across the water.
Frugal Engineering
Honeybee Network
Mannu
National Innovation Foundation- India
Sameer Khurana
The character of Mannu, Navin’s friend and sidekick is played by Sameer Khurana, whose nickname in real-life lends itself to the character. Another of the many non-actors in the film, Mannu has been a close friend and associate of Sohum’s in real life too, and the two had spent a lot of time together in the years between 2000 and 2008. In his quick repertoire of wisecracks, in his coarse and loud-mouthed but sincere and endearing manner; Mannu, who in most settings in real-life takes it upon himself to provide the humour for the meeting; essentially plays a version of himself. Possessed with a mostly-hilarious sense of comic timing, he improvised quite a lot during his scenes, leading to a particularly unique chemistry with Navin, one that was quite enjoyed by worldwide audiences.
Screenplay Notes:
Mannu carries the CPU and monitor out.
Navin comes out of his room. He walks up to a sweeper busy mopping the corridor and gives him some money.
Navin walks out of the hospital with his bag slung over one shoulder. He is on the phone and gets into a car that is driven by Mannu. They drive away.
Car
Harmonium
Hurkisondas Hospital
Kabir
Mukhtiyar Ali
Poetry in Notion:
On Two Indian Folk Songs
Mukhtiyar Ali is a folk singer from Bikaner in Rajasthan. He was born in a small village called Pugal on the North West frontier of India and belongs to the semi-nomadic community of Mirasis, who have been the traditional carriers of the oral tradition of Sufiana Qalam in India. He blends the Rajasthani folk idiom with refined classicism to sing the poetry of Kabir, Mira and Sufi poets such as Bulleh Shah. Through Shabnam Virmani’s Kabir project, Mukhtiyar was spotted by world music circuits and made his international debut in July 2007. Since then, he has performed in Belgium, Sweden, China, Canada, Germany and France.
In the scene, the song Mukhtiyar sings is ‘Bataayu Levan Ne’. It is a popular Haryanvi folk melody that evokes the scene of a newly-wed bride departing for her husband’s house. During the shoot, he also briefly sang another Kabir poem- a personal favourite of Anand’s; a famous song called ‘Bhala Hua’. The song presents a satirical series of verses about a woman who has broken her pot, and is thankful for it, for she is now free from the daily chore of fetching water. Kabir then uses this as a simple metaphor to highlight the ritual aspect of daily religion. The woman has now broken her rosary thread, but that would free her schedule up from daily ritual prayers. She quite gleefully remarks that the ‘Balaa’ (an old Urdu word that means ‘Calamity’ or ‘Distress’) has been averted, a great misfortune has been lifted off of her head, in the case of the pot- literally so!
Bhala Hua Meri Matki Phooti
Main Paniya Bharan Se Chhooti Re
More Sar Se Tali Bala!
Bhala Hua Meri Mala Tooti
Main To Ram Bhajan Se Chhooti Re
More Sar Se Tali Bala!
Perhaps due to its classical rhythmic structures, and the simple messages they seek to communicate, this folk staples has been sung, re-sung, re-composed and adapted into a stunning variety of music styles, ranging from Qawalli’s to modern fusion rock.
The words and music of the ancient weaver-poet of Varanasi have had a major thematic presence in Anand's work. IN Right Here, Right Now, the film is layered with a jingling version of Kabir's 'Jhini re Chadariya'. The end-credits read 'Lyrics ripped from Kabir Bhajanmala (Rs. 12 only, thank you)'!
SCENE 61
INT. HOSPITAL – DAY
Mannu walks through the corridor with Navin's CPU and monitor.
He enters the ward. In the corner a man sings while playing a harmonium.
Ajji is in bed wearing a green gown, with a serene smile on her face.
Mannu stands awkwardly holding the computer. Navin gestures with a slight nod and Mannu places the computer aside.
Navin's phone begins to ring and he leaves the ward. The young woman from Ajji's house and a few older women are also present. Ajji looks irritated at Navin's sudden exit. The performance continues.
When Navin returns she isn't any happier but slowly loses herself to the music. The serene smile returns and settles her features.
Navin gestures to Mannu to join him. He whispers in Mannu's ear. Mannu leaves the ward but signals for Navin to meet him outside. Navin leaves.
The Hospital scenes were filmed at the Hurkisondas Hospital in Girgaon, Mumbai. It is old of Old Bombay's most prestigious Heritage Buildings. It has since been restored into a multi-speciality hospital. These shots of the hospital in the film are perhaps the last portraits of the unique post-colonial air of the old HN Hospital.
Making a cameo among Bhanu Ajji’s group of liberal, progressive-minded friends is the filmmaker and columnist Paromita Vohra. Also heard in the scene, as the person who asks 'Who did you vote for?' is Production Designer Rakesh Yadav.
Director’s Notes:
The Cut Abroad to Stockholm:
“It was a very deliberate decision on our end. We had shot at a screenplay level. This was the shot I had imagined but I had not articulated it that clearly so when we shot, I was a little insecure. I did take a few shots, I did take a shot of a flight from inside and outside, of him landing in Stockholm, there’s a scene of Rupesh coming and picking him up at the airport and they have conversations where Rupesh says how Sekseria had him connected to Rupesh (who plays the character of Ajay) so I took all of that out on the edit table because I thought it was unnecessary explanation. In cinema we have arrived at a point of cinematic evolution where that can be expected of the audience to understand cuts like this very easily. It seemed a bit radical to some of our friends when we were ready to show the film and people were like “What! That’s just too radical!” but we felt convinced about it.”
Rupesh
Sweden, with its small population and a fine balance in their Socialist-Capitalist form of government, is perhaps the best example of the 'Nordic Model'; a network of Scandinavian countries that have the best public services in the world, right down to clean water to drink straight form the tap. These countries that with very high scores on indices that measure Happiness, Satisfaction, and even Contentment. Navin's surprised, even stunned look at seeing the gush of clean water flowing into the glass is quite genuine. Whey they first arrived in Stockholm, Anand remembers seeing Sohum just as surprised when he first saw that an entire country had clean tap water to drink!
Tap Water
The Cut to Stockholm
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