JUST SHOOT THEM

We don’t search for droppings now; we just reach for a cell phone or a camcorder. A 2-megapixel camera on his Nokia N72 is enough for Devesh Singh. The 38-year-old freelance tour guide has turned his obsession of taking videos into an obstinate daily ritual. If he is not focusing his phone on his eight- and five-year-old boys playing or fighting, he makes a 60-second self-portrait or even record a scene on Animal Planet. He belongs to the new tribe that is not content consuming visuals of Shah Rukh Khan or Shakira or saas-bahu; they create their own Bollywood. Like the 22-year-old engineer Rishabh Kale or the 19-year-old student Ritika Kochhar who keep the camera phone ready because they “don’t want to miss the moment”. Like 20-something Avinash Kumar whose random videos adds to the gigs of his Delhi band B.L.O.T, making it an aural-visual experience. Like the 30-something Indu who stood by a Kathakali stage, one purple night in Kerala, with her camera trained on a green-masked Nala. Far away in Mumbai, the kilobytes would do to her what madeleine did to Proust. As Parul Dave Mukherjee, dean of the School of Art and Aesthetics, JNU, says, “It is the emergence of a new visual-centric culture, with new ways of seeing and interpreting the world.”

It is a world that is slowly dispensing with words. Haider Mazhari would not write an email to his parents in Shillong about his wife’s birthday party; the Gurgaon-based camera-phone junkie would instead send a video. There is immediacy, the geographical distance is breached and somehow time is recaptured on RealPlayer. Elsewhere in Medak, Andhra Pradesh, with help from the Deccan Development Society, a group of illiterate women farmers has just made a 10-minute video—a eulogy to millet. Their 35-year-old camerawoman Narsamma Masanagar says, “I can say whatever I want through my pictures. I don’t need to write. I have never felt handicapped because I am illiterate.” Her vocabulary is of images, she does not need to learn to write a thousand words; she just needs to know how to switch on her camera and record and perhaps edit a rough cut. Some of her videos even do away with voiceovers.

It is a transition, from the creation of visuals by a few to the many. But are these home videos, these happenstance images art? Raghu Rai, one of India’s prominent photographers, does have a camera phone but he will not click a single picture with it. “There is a bulk of pictures now, but not all of them become images, not everything is art. Is it anything more than a record of information?” he asks.

Mukherjee points out that this elitist concern is there: “Some would say that we are moving to a new kind of primitivism, where we take delight in the most commonplace things and stop thinking critically of images.”
Pallavi Chaturvedi, a 36-year-old homemaker who discovered the pleasures of photography with the joys of motherhood, happily calls her works crowding the laptop and memory chips, art. As her one-year-old smiles in the pram, she says, “Not a day passes by without me taking his picture. My sister in California has seen him grow up because of those pictures.” She keeps her Panasonic camcorder right by her bedside, and early morning she would be off to the balcony to capture a bird nest or her baby or her nephew on his way to school. Are her images of bulbul and a fidgety schoolboy waiting for his bus art? She says yes, reminding you almost of the harrumph of commoners storming the Versailles. As though it is the age of images by the people, of the people, for the people.

Ask comedian Kunal Kumar. In mega-bucks Bollywood, he cannot dream of making a feature film, but once the shoot is wrapped up, the 28-year-old is off to create his minutes-long videos with his camera phone and camcorder – like he did in Bhopal recently. When the shoot of Rajshri Films’ Ek Vivah Aisi Bhi was wrapped at 5 pm, he went to the fair near his hotel to capture, in a 10-minute video, the bikers in maut ka kua. “My phone and camera give me incredible creative freedom. It was the camera phone that taught me aesthetics,” says Kumar, who has made a music video on his phone, won awards for his shorts, gifted a picture taken with his 5-megapixel Nokia phone to Shah Rukh Khan and even sold a few others for Rs 2,500 each.

Beyond fun and fair and creative freedom, videos become hallowed too in this invasion of images. A few Indians in Kansas and Pennsylvania and New York have DVDs that would not be carelessly stashed away with their Marlon Brando or Manoj Night Shyamalan. These are the videos of the asthivisarjan ceremony in Varanasi. When Allan Pirie and Kameshwar Singh started the Sacred Rites of the Ganges less than two years ago to help—for $1,100-2,000—time-starved Indian-Americans who want the last rites of their loved ones to be done in the holy river, they decided to make arrangements for the urn of ashes to be shipped to India, get a horde of Brahmins to do the ceremony and also, importantly, install digital cameras on the ghats. The “custom-made DVD” would then be sent to the grieving family on the faraway shore. Says Pirie: “It is important for them to know that the proper Hindu ceremony has been performed, and be able to view it. Seeing the asthivisarjan ceremony performed on the waters of the Ganges was a touching experience for many.”
It is just another way life—and death—get stored in images. It is just the shape of things to come.