The short slow motion video KUMBH was shot by me in the Maha Kumbh Mela 2013 in Allahabad. The video was edited by Ayush Dinker, and produced under the banner of Ethereal, a creative house co-founded by Ayush and I. I left Ethereal in October 2013.
Kynja Babha is a five-year-old girl in the faraway village of Khrang in the East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya. Kynja, the daughter of a broom cultivator, comes from a Below Poverty Line (BPL) family. Her father has a small broom farm down the slopes on the edge of the village. She has three sisters…
Primarily associated with the Tantric Shakti cult of worship, Ambubachi celebrates the menstruation period of Goddess Kamakhya. The gates of the Kamakhya temple in Guwahati remain closed for three days while lakhs of believers, who gather at the temple from all across the country, chant from the sciptures and sing devotional songs. The gates are…
“We Indians are so habituated to a well-defined ending to film plots that The Lunchbox’s open-ended finish not only left me stumped but made me rather uncomfortable,” a friend told me after watching Ritesh Batra’s critically acclaimed film. After a successful run at Cannes and winning awards in film festivals across the world, The Lunchbox…
Mridul, my friend, told me how life had changed in the village after people with guns started to roam around like rabid dogs. Everyone in the family had been killed. Hiren, his wife, their two sons who were in primary school, his eighty year-old grandmother, his mother, his father and the maid who came to…
The atmosphere was tense, with the expectation of simmering trouble. The woman on the stage at the Central Lecture Hall at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras last Monday, was someone who has dedicated her life to fighting for the victims of communal violence. Teesta Setalvad had just completed her speech on “Human Rights and…
When Dilip Deka, a medicine shop owner and his wife Kalyani arrived in Guwahati on June 6 2008, carrying their 4-years old feverish son, they did not know that for the next three years their little son would only be a frozen self of himself. After a brief stay at the Sanjeevani Hospital, Guwahati, the…
Abhishek Saha 