Maybe an Orang Utan

Childhood dangers in India…
Jessica: We had to be careful not to get sick, Delhi belly or dysentery.
Rowan: Animals?
Jessica: Oh yes. Cobras. There was one on the corner where we caught the bus.
Rowan: Every day?
Jessica: Sometimes. It was a snake charmer’s. And one day there was a monkey up the tree in our garden.
Rowan: Wild?
Jessica: It had escaped from the zoo next door. I was going out the door and it was up the tree looking at me. I backed inside. The servants took care of it. 
Rowan: They caught it?
Jessica: They called the zoo people and they came.
Rowan: What kind of monkey?
Jessica: Maybe a specialized monkey. It was orange. Anyway, I missed the school bus so Mom wrote a note saying it was because of the monkey.
Rowan: A feasible reason. Sounds like an orang utan. An ape, not a monkey.

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Voice-over
Orang utans are apes, and tailless, unlike monkeys. Orange-brown, living in densely foliaged trees, so maybe not needing darkly pigmented skin like gorillas for UV protection.

On the wall of Galle

On the ramparts…

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Galle Granite

Imal: This is a good place to view the sunset. And boys dive from that rock.

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Piet: This part of the wall must be Dutch, made of granite blocks and coral. Strong. And wide enough to carry cannons. The Portuguese wall was just mud and palisades.

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Imal: You’re a professor of history? You would do well to stay here for a few days.

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Piet: Sinhalese, Portuguese, Dutch, British and now back to Sri Lanka.

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Imal: But we still live in the shadow of other powers. Now we worry about the rise of China and India.

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Voice-over

Conforming to a UNESCO criterion: A site showing the interaction of European and South Asian cultures from the 16th to the 19th centuries. And incidentally, architecture as a reflection of colonial rule.

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Indian film: Bioscopewala

A film about cinema...

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Addie Quested: Right up there with Cinema Paradiso and Good morning Babilonia. Is the genre Bollywood?

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Fruit selling to film showing

Anne Sari: Bollywood is often about drama, music, dance, romance. It doesn’t have much of that. But Hindi cinema contains epic references, family stories and stories within stories. So there’s an element of Bollywood.

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Addie Quested: What prompted the format?

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Anne Sari: Actually it was the story of Kabuliwala, by Rabindranath Tagore that formed the structure.

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Addie Quested: A dried-fruit seller from Kabul. An old story,1892.

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Anne Sari: Yes. We called the girl Mini too, but made put into a modern context. In the 1990s, the bioscopewala, an Afghan itinerant, who showed cinema in the streets, befriended Mini because she reminded him of his daughter. Her father, a photographer, also befriended him. Jump forward twenty years, Mini’s father died on his way to Kabul, the bioscopewala has been in prison and lost his mind, so Mini sets out on a pilgrimage to put the pieces together.

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Voice-over

Bioscopewala: a bioscope is a simple cinema, a wala is one who runs a bioscope. Echoes of literature, twists in the plot, the characters struggle and develop. Good one!

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Visual Vignettes from Incredible India

An attempt to capture a festival on film…

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Anil: Take any pictures?

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Tara: Four hundred photos. Forty footage clips. That’s after pre-editing and throwing out the failures.

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Anil: Is there a theme? Is there a message? Is there a story coming through?

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Tara: That’s the trouble. Shooting randomly at a festival. Lots of tiny vignettes but no story running though them all. And not many audible comments.

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Anil: It was an Indian festival. In Tokyo. Multiculturalism?

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Tara: Indian dances with Japanese dancers. Food, culture, music, people. And parrots. A lot of fun.

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Voice-over

Festivals may seem rich seams for filming. Leaving aside the difficulties of shooting in crowds, the blurs, the interrupted shots, it is possible to create short stories told in images and short takes. A series of visual vignettes.

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Kinetic Luna

Harry, who is part Indian, has abandoned his attempt to cycle around Northern Territory and has elected to do it by moped instead.

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Reporter: The local community wishes you well on this expedition. But we are curious why you chose, out of all possible motorcycles, the Kinetic Luna.

Harry: Many reasons. There are long distances between filling stations. On this I can do 200 ks on a tankful… My ancestors are from India and this is a moped which has been made in India for forty years. It isn’t difficult to fix if it breaks down.

Reporter: I see tools on the ground already.

Harry: I just assembled it.

Reporter: You’ve tested it?

Harry: Around the back lawn.

Reporter: And a final question: what is the horsepower?

Harry: One horsepower. Hills are no small problem for it but it has pedals and there aren’t many hills in Northern Territory.

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Voiceover

Less is more. In this case understatement (we are curious = we are incredulous) and litotes (hills are no small problem) mark both the reporter’s questions and Harry’s answers. We might also note that the name of the scooter could be lessened to Lunatic!
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Cyclical argument

Anil wonders if the problem is in the ignition switch.

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Dipak:I don't think so.

Anil: Then what are you thinking the problem could be?

Dipak: These machines are a problem. We are relying on them so much they are ruling our lives and governing our behavior.

Anil: That's all very well but we must be arriving at Chandrapore before dark.

Dipak: You see? If we were not having a machine we would not have been setting out for Chandrapore.

Anil: I am beginning to see what you are saying. And if we did not have to go to Chandrapore we would not have to be relying on this machine.

Dipak: Life was simpler when we walked everywhere.

Voiceover

It is not only Dipak and Anil who becme ensnared by circular reasoning. When Descartes wrote, “I think, therefore I am,” he was employing a circular reasoning because by saying, “I think…” he was already declaring that he existed.

Perhaps life was simpler when we communicated only using the simple present.

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