MAN

 Me: Then I guess I am no less than a woman

She: What are you saying.... You are much more than any woman I know.

 

Warm hearts of the wettest place

 Christophe, contacted me in the beginning of 2019 for a documentary film on the wettest place on earth, Mawsynram. I said, I lived in Charrapunji as I child when I was eight year old. And if you asked me that was one of the best places I have ever lived… Sometimes there was no electricity for days and nights, and it rained all the time, fog so dense that if you spread your arms the chances are you won’t be able to see the end of your fingers. There were leaches outside and inside there were mouse which made holes across the wooden walls…  Still grass was softest I ever walked on… there were innumerable narrow water streams with colorful flowers blooming both sides of streams. That place was magic. And still is.

Little more than 30 years since I got an opportunity to revisit the place for recce… 

The house I lived is now converted into a primary school… the streams are still there and so are the flowers… Who would I know there now? Who would know me here now? 

Shining star worked with my father.. He used to take me fishing in the weekends. He was 26 then he was married, had three daughters and he wanted a son like me or so he said to my parents. I asked around for him  and found him sitting on the balcony of his new house. With gray hair and long retired…  and I have grown and I have changed too… I said, I am Samrat and he knew who I was… We met after so many years but we spoke and laughed as time does not exist. He introduced me to his 19 years old son Pynhun… lovely Kid.. 

The shoot did not happen in 2019 and then the next two we were paralyzed by the pandemic. Christophe and I were in touch, I used to occasionally send him photos of Mumbai rains.

We had three years to prepare for the shoot… we thought we were prepared… we were not… 

We had an amazing team… Alan is a musician, an artist whom I knew for last fifteen years was kind enough to drive us around and to translate for us. We had Pramod who was nothing less than a wizard when it came to assist Christophe, Pramod also flew the drone for us.  Alexandra the anchor of the show… She embodied the show… The show is call ‘ droles de ville pour une rencontre’ which loosely translate to “meetings in interesting places”… In the show she spends 15 days with a family living in a interesting place. For this show she travelled all around the world, from coldest city to highest city and for this episode she came to Mawsyram the wettest place on earth. She never compromises with the story or with the family. She actually stays with a family in their village/ town for 15 days doing whatever they do to survive the place. She cleans with them, she cooks with them she does all the daily chores with or without the camera on her. It is lovely to know her and each and every time the family falls in love with her…

Deiphi and Jessie hosted Alexandra but in reality the entire village came forward to host the team. Words here won’t justify the warmth and the support we received from the people of Mawsynram. Sando, trueman, Last Born(the village headman) are just few of the names I cannot but mention here… if I wouldn’t have spent time there I would not know that the wettest place on earth has some of the most warmest people living there. 

The Team was headed by Christophe, he was directing, doing the camera and the sound, basically doing the work of atleast three people if not more. That itself is a very difficult job but shooting in continuous heavy rain with humidity always at 100 percent is a different game altogether. Still we were managing well and within 10 days of the shoot we shot almost eighty percent of the documentary and then the eleventh day we went to Cherrapunji to shoot the living root bridges… and that day we experienced rains like never before. Cherrapunji broke the record of last 27 years. In one single day it rained more than that of rains France receive in an entire year…

We had camera covers, umbrella, rain covers…. We were drenched to our bones all our equipment including our cameras were dripping water…  Christophe could hardly see anything trough view finder or through the camera monitor… all got moisture in it and because of condensation shooting was almost next to impossible.  Christophe continued to shoot and we made the impossible happen. The root bridge sequence came out to be one of the most dramatic sequences of the film.   

Christophe fell sick after that day but he continued to shoot. The rains almost broke our bodies and equipments but not our spirits… 

What a beautiful show it turned out to be… 

PS. Special thanks Laurent from TSVP for making things smooth for us…