Green Lens Media

Tag: reflection

  • To Film or Not to Film? That Is The Question

    Being in film school makes you feel like you’ve aged 50 years in the span of two. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad thing.

    I grew up in India, a country with brilliant minds and bold hearts. A country where your average young person is capable – and driven – enough to be exactly what they want to be, and be successful at it. But for the young Indian, being successful isn’t even the difficult part. The difficult part is self-knowledge. Knowing what you want to do. Finding the power to know, in a country where your future is determined as soon as you’re born: doctor, lawyer, engineer, business executive.

    When I applied to college, I applied as a journalism major. Far enough from the Indian career mold to be creative, but not so far that I can’t bank on the degree to get me a job when I graduate. The perfect balance.

    But coming to college changed everything.

    The idea of getting involved with filmmaking emerged from the experience of moving to the United States. I was in a new city, a new country, a new world. I was given a chance to rewrite my story, make new memories and, most importantly, get to know the person I would become. Suddenly, I was exposed to people from all over the world – my roommate was Korean, my best friend was Mexican, my study partner was half-Polish. Being surrounded by interesting people and interesting stories makes you fall into storytelling, even if you didn’t set out to do it.

    I’d always been interested in film, but it had never occurred to me that it was something I could do forever. There was something so exhilarating about the concept of creating something from nothing: of engaging in a craft founded in emotion and unpredictability; an outlier in the textbook-and-problem-set world of conventional knowledge.

    Think about the great directors of the world, for example. Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese (to name a few.)

    Now try separating film from filmmaker. You can’t.

    Every storyteller is unique. They vary in so many ways, but are great storytellers nonetheless. There are no formulas and numbers involved in storytelling. No right answers. No wrong answers. Just instinct and imagination.

    Terrifying, isn’t it? Having no rules? I can’t say it isn’t.

    But I wouldn’t be able to call my life a full life without stories. My life has been characterized by change. I’ve lived in Mumbai, Boston, Paris and London – I’ve been challenged, pushed out of my comfort zone and made to build up from scratch. By being exposed to stories and the storytellers that tell them, I’ve grown beyond the 20 years I’ve spent on this planet, because none of the places I lived in ever came with rules. But they came with faces, places and stories that are such an important part of my life. And that’s why I could never be a doctor, lawyer, engineer or business person.

    It might be human nature to fear the unknown, but it’s a filmmaker’s instinct to embrace it.

    Is it terrifying? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

  • One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind: Boston Walk for Hunger

    If you look at an early map of the world, you’ll see a sphere. In that sphere is land – two large chunks of it – and water. If you look at a map of the world today, you’ll still see land and water. But they don’t exist within a sphere, nor do they exist in big large chunks. They’re divided. The creators of these divisions divided the large chunks of land into all kinds of odd shapes, colour coded them by money, population, economic power. Even the vast expanse of blue within which they all float is divided – this ocean, that plate, this channel.

    With these divisions so deeply ingrained within our cognitive understanding of the world, it is sometimes difficult to remember that these lines that divide up the world aren’t much more than what they appear to be: ink on paper. The interesting part about this ink on paper is that the ink was probably made in a completely different place than the paper; and the cartographer using the ink and paper sits on a wooden chair made in another chunk of land altogether. What the ink, paper and wood ultimately represent, then, is the people of the world whose needs brought them into existence: people, who, despite the divisions that separate them, partook in the shared experience of living on this planet and subsisting on its resources.

    Because the world gradually became bigger and more divided than it once was, it became easy for people to lose sight of the bigger picture. While words like “pollution,” “climate change” and “fossil fuels” began to pop up in the world’s vocabulary, they were written off as far-fetched, too conceptual to truly materialize. When they did begin to materialize, the first instinct was to worry. After all, the world is so much bigger than the people who consume its resources.

    The good thing about all this worrying, though, is that it has given rise to awareness. There is a desire to change things, and the citizens of the world are beginning to take things into their own hands. In the coffee shop down the road, a teenager is doing her part by getting her morning coffee in a reusable mug. On the other side of the world, someone is picking up an abandoned newspaper from a London Underground train and putting it in a recycling bin. Somewhere else in the world, a mother is picking up a candy wrapper from the sidewalk and admonishing her little boy for failing to throw it in a trash can. And this past Sunday, thousands of volunteers walked for Project Bread’s Walk for Hunger, raising thousands of dollars towards hunger in Massachusetts.

    According to Project Bread’s website, this annual walk has made ending hunger in Massachusetts a goal within reach. The simple gesture of walking has, year after year, had far-reaching consequences for schools and communities in Massachusetts. And if walking can spread the message and make a difference, so can the reusable mug, the recycle bin, the moralizing mom. Big change is ultimately a culmination of little steps towards it. Little steps that dare to shake the conviction that the world can’t be saved, or is too divided to be saved. The reason little gestures translate to big change is because the magnitude of the gesture transcends the action itself. All it takes is the simple recognition of the power that we have to bring about change, the ability to recall that first simple image of the world – as one big mass of land, with resources to be shared and maintained by all its citizens.