Film & Video Design I Storytelling
Panchkosh
In Design Project II we had to chose between "Language or Public Memory", the umbrella themes for our projects. These themes were decided to encourage us to deal with something less well defined, and that will involve engaging with communities and their practices of commemoration and memorialisation, or even the gaps in collective memory.
Proposal:
In the city of old Ahmedabad, we find narrow streets of different widths; few so narrow that only a single person can pass through it at a time. Though the streets look narrow, these localities accommodate people of different classes and professions; they are full of diversity such as class, age, caste, profession, etc. and drama of the life stories. With the drama, these lanes bring great deal of adjustments like traffic, congested living spaces, lack of facilities, etc. to the lives of local people; people have their own troubles to overcome.
My purpose behind taking this project is to collect stories/memories of the people residing in these localities and to identify the memories because of the narrow lanes. After identifying such stories, weaving them into a single narration/script to make a video or any suitable medium to express it.
Panchkosh
“Panch-kosh” as it suggests, is the collection of five narratives based on the collective memory of the people living, connected or have experienced significant time in the narrow lanes.
Poetic part narrates how spaces have their own collective memory, with the spaces humans, animals and the interacting living beings tend to develop the memories and accordingly shape/ routine their lives. It also has my connection and nostalgia of my childhood days which is personal.
Though this is personal, I believe there are many within whom the similar nostalgia will occur which eventually is forms a collective sense of memory.
Four narratives are picked up from the stories shared by the people living in the narrow lanes of old Ahmedabad. Out of which three narratives are based on the real incidents and the one is based on the story an elder told us when I was interviewing a group in the lanes, to become the part our collective memory.