Talking about my life

Film-maker Ranjan Kamath’s ‘Mitra Tantra -- Archive of Personal Narratives and Oral Testimonies’ allows the eminent and the ordinary to reminiscence about their lives

Pics: Film-maker MS Sathyu; film director Ranjan Kamath

By Shevlin Sebastian

Noted film-maker MS Sathyu is sitting on a wooden chair in his living room at Bengaluru. Behind him is a sofa which has large pillows. On the cream-coloured walls, there are framed paintings. It is a tranquil setting. But Sathyu, clad in a grey waistcoat and trousers, looks sombre.

Raising a despairing hand, he says, “I blame [late Prime Minister] Mrs Indira Gandhi for all what is happening now. She became corrupt. When she was Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter, she was all right. But the moment she entered politics and became the President of the Congress Party, and the first Communist government was installed in Kerala, under EMS Namboodiripad, she destroyed it. And later, when she lost the elections, she brought in the Emergency. She was mad for power. Now all the politicians have become corrupt.”

He pauses and then says, “The assets that they declare during election time, I wonder where did they get that much money. They only talk in crores. That poor fellow, [Manik] Sarkar in Tripura, he does not even have a car. He has no bank balance. He has no money. And he was the Chief Minister for 20 long years. That kind of integrity is not there anymore.”

Sathyu was a participant in the ‘Mitra Tantra -- Archive of Personal Narratives and Oral Testimonies’ organised by film-maker Ranjan Kamath. Some of the other participants included author Shashi Deshpande, artist Balan Nambiar, scientist Prof. CNR Rao, historian S. Theodore Baskaran, filmmaker Girish Kasaravalli, Captain CR Gopinath, father of low cost aviation, and many others.

The reminiscences are free-flowing. Participants take anywhere between 4 and 7 ½ hours. “The stories include events from their childhood, school and college life, careers, failures, day-to-day life, relationships, friendships, collaborations, witnessing the Partition and Emergency first-hand, growing up in Bengaluru, and views on marriage and family,” says Ranjan. “It is a fascinating variety of topics.”

Ranjan gives them a brief before the shoot. “I tell them there is nothing too insignificant or inconsequential,” he says. “I want them to talk as they feel. It is a liberating experience for them to talk spontaneously.”

The result is heartfelt. Many times the sincerity, truthfulness and vulnerability shine through.

Some stories can be agonisingly sad. Kishore S Rao, the chairman of Karunashraya, a cancer hospice in Bengaluru, recounted the story of a house painter, Basavaraj (name changed), who was in the final stages of lung cancer. “He kept asking the nurses, doctors and staff, ‘How much do I pay?’” says Kishore. “We told him there are no charges. But Basavaraj found it difficult to believe. Because everywhere he went, whether it was to a government facility or private hospital, he had to pay, either over or under the table.”

Basavaraj said, “It is impossible that this place is free. How much do I pay?”

A nurse again said, “You have to pay nothing.”

So, he said, “I have to do something to repay.”

Then he made a list, of paints and brushes and asked the nurses to get the material, so that he could paint the walls for free. The hospice bought the material just to make him feel good. “Because, by then, he was too weak to do anything,” says Kishore. “In fact, he passed a few days later.”

As he said that tears rolled down Kishore’s face.

When Ranjan saw that, he remembered his own sadness. His mother, Cecelia D’Souza, a former teacher passed away, on May 29, 2017, at the age of 79. “She died within 30 days of discovering that she had liver cancer,” he says.

When he gazed at his mother, Ranjan suddenly realised that he had lost his chance to record her memories. “That’s when I realised that if I can’t do it for myself, I must do it for others,” he says. “For years, people have been passing away -- great singers, artists, actors and writers. And I realised that nobody has preserved their wisdom and experience. So that was the immediate trigger.”

Ranjan had already seen a format. His friend, the British film-maker Christopher Sykes has done a project called Web Of Stories. “Some of the greatest achievers, like author Vladimir Nabokov, actor Richard Pryor and the writer Philip Roth shared their life stories,” he says.

But Ranjan does not want to do it only on the eminent. “That would become too exclusive,” he says. “So I am also looking for ordinary people to tell their stories.”

But the immediate problem is funding. So far, he has spent a few lakhs of rupees doing the recordings. “What is driving me is the sheer joy I experience when I listen to the stories,” he says. “But I want people to own this and contribute financially to this project.”

Ranjan is also looking for corporate as well as private funding. All the recordings will be put up on a website as well as on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Interestingly, the clips that he has put up so far, range from 90 seconds to three minutes only.

“That’s the attention span these days,” he says, with a rueful smile. So, for Sathyu, there are 78 videos, most with an average time of one minute. “But if you listen to all, it is like getting a university degree, in terms of knowledge and insights,” says Ranjan.

One insight is about the relationship between the sexes. “Husband and wives speak separately,” says Ranjan. “The idea is that you get different perspectives of the marriage. But what I have noticed is that there is a bitterness and a suppressed anger which comes up between the spouses.”

This could be seen clearly in the women, those who were very accomplished and had to give up their careers because their husbands were equally accomplished but they are living in a patriarchal society, so they had to give up their careers and look after the family and home.

“This has certainly come through in women who are in their seventies and eighties,” says Ranjan. “Marriage takes on different dimensions. There are changes and adjustments to each decade. Spouses become either friends or partnerships. There is some sort of love. But if you ask them individually whether they love their spouses, they might say, ‘I don’t know’.”

There were other interesting insights. “Women are more forthright in expressing their emotional side,” says Ranjan. “For men, the thinking mind comes through. There is a gender divide. Men want to share their minds and their philosophies. Women are more comfortable sharing their emotions. Men took a lot of time to tap into that. This could be why there is a problem between the sexes.”

But what was clear in the interviews is despite the marital strains, the men were very appreciative of the roles of their spouses. “Most of the menfolk have unequivocally said that were it not for their wives, they would not have reached where they are today.

Spouses gave unconditional support particularly for those who were in the creative fields. It enabled the men to go ahead and do what they wanted to do, without worrying about the household, or that kind of thing. The partnership was critical. The women, themselves, could have had a great career but they chose to support their husbands. The men were

appreciative of that.”

(An edited version was published in Sunday Magazine, The New Indian Express, South India and Delhi)