I went to school called life and taught
myself, cinema.
I always knew that I wanted to make movies,
even before I saw one at age of eight. I lived in a very small and poor village
in Suarashtra, next to a railway junction where many trains stopped but only to
exchange passengers. My village was nobody’s destination. As a kid I sold tea
on this unique railway platform. I would often sit on the rail track, waiting
eternally for train to arrive, staring at the shadows of five empty cups of tea
hanging from my fingers. I would animate my fingers and imagine all kinds of
shadow-play.
Today, in Paris, I sit in front of my
MacBook Pro, I am staring at my five fingers on the keyboard, and a tiny caret
blinks on the screen, keeping pace with my heartbeats. A noisy iPhone keeps
vibrating. An air-ticket to Goa, few papers and a cup of tea lies next to the
laptop.
So much has happened between two cups of
teas.
And all happenings in our lives are result
of our desire and destiny. Samsara is the story of desire and destiny. Samsara
is the story of celebration of life.
While making documentaries I was seeking
realities. I had filmed destinies and desires, as they are, not how they
existed in my imagination. Desire often rises in Samsara, the world, where we
live. I am living all kinds of desires like all beings. My desire to tell the
story of Tashi and Pema came from my imagination and my imagination probably
came from what I had lived. In one way or another we returned to reality. We
returned to life.
For me, to tell their story was also to
control their destiny.
I can play god for 135 minutes at the rate
of 24 frames per second.
Samsara is the world; inside the monastery
and outside the monastery. A monk, Tashi who leaves the monastic life and
becomes farmer, to live a worldly life. But Pema possesses qualities of a great
monk while living in the world.
We all at one or another point of our life
are tempted to change things, escape or leave everything behind and go somewhere.
Samsara for me has always been the story of
that somewhere.
Pan
Nalin
20th
November 2012
