The building I reside in, is located beside the canal road connecting Bhandarkar Road with Agarkar Road. The road condition is such that it is rarely used by vehicles and so it’s primarily meant for pedestrains.

Many years back, the canal road was a nice, green and clean place. But today it’s become a garbage dump. The corporation has ignored the road and so its become a garbage dump. The garbage in turn is disposed of by burning it and creating a horrible smog over the area.

As I cannot possibly keep a watch all day and stop people from using the road and the canal as a dump, the only feasible solution is to keep the road so clean that people hesitate before dumping any garbage. Could also put up boards that educate people.

Unfortunately dumping garbage in public places is so much a part of Indian psyche that even the educated and affluent lot rarely hesitate before they throw garbage at any place that does not belong to them. Absense of civic sense is perhaps India’s biggest problem.

Our leaders are very good at working up passions and causing trouble over stupid issues but when it comes to constructive work, no leader or political party ever uses its mass base to do good. Have you ever heard a mmber of parliament tell his supporters to not spit on the road or clean up his surroundings, educate his children…

That apart…So what I am planning, is to forget about the corporation fixing things and get down to doing them ourselves…

A cleanliness drive for the canal roads in Pune. If I manage to find more volunteers we can take up not just the bhandarkar road – agarkar road connection but even more. If not, I intend to atleast fix the bhandarkar road – agarkar road stretch.

We planted trees last year beside this same road, but all of them were pulled out for firewood by teams of women from the slums who desperately need wood for cooking.

Just goes to show how interlinked things are: The rich, educated or powerful can never have the surroundings they want unless they work for the illiterate, poor and helpless to get their rights. So essentially the trees I plant can survive only if the poor get cheap fuel to cook their meals.

Hmmmm….lots of mixed thoughts put into one blog entry. not the best way to write, but I guess blog’s are meant to be that way … random thoughts put down in the order in which they come up.

I recently completed a short course of documentary film making at OpenSpace. Attended the course for no reason other than learning a new and intersting skill. The course was good fun and I got a lot of info about film making.

Documentary film makers however seemed obsessed with a few things and seem to forget that films esentially are about the viewer liking them and not only about getting critical acclaim.

There was always an attempt to find a deep meaning in every little thing shown on screen. One of the discussions we had in the course was “Why were the tomatoes shown in a film so red. Was there some reason the director chose to show tomatos so red?”. Not much came out of the discussion, but we did eventually named the course googlegroup as ‘redtomato’.

For the practicals we were split into groups of 4-5 people and asked to pick a topic. My team’s documentary was “Nagrik : Documentary on public participation in solving problems faced by a city”

Click here to view the documentary. Have lots more to write about documentary making. Hope to do that soon.