The Caregivers: Post-Production: 3: Final

I did a first cut of the documentary by end-September. It came back with comments by mid-November 2014.
I did a modified cut, changing almost 70% of the structure. Basically re-cut the documentary, working carefully to make the structure 'flow' better.
When you do a 'first cut', you only visualise your script or the ideas that you had set out to express. You aren't really looking at the material that you have. Normally, an experienced editor does that for you- looking at the material rather than your script and ideas.
In the case of this documentary, I needed to do that part myself, Perhaps the delayed approvals were a bit of a blessing as that enabled me to get a bit of 'distance' from the 'shot material'.
These terms like 'distance'/'visualise' are what we use daily as filmmakers, but can sometimes get a bit tricky to understand for other people. So if you do have a problem with them, let me know, I'd be glad to explain.
What did help a lot were the screenings I had over time for other people- these really help in learning about how how people react to your work.
I made the final changes to the documentary based on the screening at Abha Manav Mandir. While discussing the screening with Shri Govil, the Chairman of the MGM Trust that runs the home, he pointed out that the documentary was a bit incomprehensible to audiences as they felt the story jumped in its themes, and perhaps  I needed to 'guide' the viewing audience a bit more. I know that the structure of the documentary moves a lot, especially for a short duration documentary and the links from point to point are more in the nature of 'subject'/'topic'/ 'thematic' links. So I grasped the point about underlining the 'links', not making the documentary 'too abstract' in its style. Then I set about finding solutions to the problem.
This problem does happen and the underlining can 'add' to a documentary. I learnt that in the Karim documentary in Kenya.
The documentary is out in public now, unless I am told by the Censor Board to make further changes.
So this will remain the final post on the 'making' of The Caregivers.

The Caregivers: Post-Production: 2

I did cover a lot of ground on the editing of  The Caregivers in the last post, but perhaps it was a bit too headline oriented, I did not go into detail, so I guess I'll do it now.
We edited on an iMac but with Adobe Premiere (can't remember the version used). I've never worked on it before, but after years of working on diverse machines for editing, I believe anything that your operator is comfortable with is fine.
For 'The Caregivers', editor Pankaj Vashishta knew the software and the machine fairly well and had his boss, and our Post-Production Supervisor Snigdh Bhatnagar, available to solve any issues that came up.
We began slowly, I hadn't really seen the footage as it was being downloaded from the cards and later organised. The only point to remember there was that the recording keeping by our unit had been pretty bad. To the extent that the Assistant Director who made the notes couldn't read them himself! Anyway, its a half-an-hour documentary so the shot material wasn't too much, especially when compared to my last project which had massive amounts of material.
My first step in these edits is to organise the material into different bins, but the editor did not know how to do that. So I  took a deep breath and moved into assembling the sequences right away. It took a week to do that, but now we had an assembly of sequences.
Then we began to put them on the timeline and adding in our narrators to get a complete logically constructed version of the shot material. All this came to and hour, and was ready by the end of week two.
We trimmed it down to half-an-hour fairly quickly and then screened it for a few friends, who could follow the story. We refined it more, this time with 'cleaned out' audio tracks and found we could trim it even more. Soon, we had a first cut ready. We then added music and a few effects. This is what we sent out to our sponsors.
The key to the structure was still what we were aiming at in the script- to tell individual stories and connect them using the medical doctor and the psychiatrist. I followed that as the'rule' and the structure sort of fell into place.
The story began to come 'alive', sequence by sequence.
That process continued till today when we added yet more elements to make the structure 'smooth' and easier for an audience to grasp.
I realise that's what editing is all about.

The Caregivers: Post-Production-1

When I was planning this documentary, I thought I'd edit in Pune, do the shooting in Meerut, transfer the material onto hard drives and then move to Pune. As it turned out the editors I wanted to work with were all busy, so I was down to some not so interesting editors.
Later in the planning, I thought of Delhi as an option, but then realised it wasn't near my bases of Meerut and Pune, so a lot of money and time would be wasted.
Then when I decided to transfer the material from the camera cards onto hard drives in Meerut, I realised that I could edit here in Meerut too.  The editors or the post-production facility aren't the greatest. But then my last two projects were edited in homes with young editors, so I said go for it.
The edit began slowly, we put the material together sequence-by-sequence, then started putting them together on a timeline. It began to make sense.
Then we screened it in a rough form to friends and realised we had a diamond in the rough.
So my editor sat down to sort out the soundtrack, while I looked for music.
I knew I wanted classical music, 'pop' just doesn't have the correct feel for a deep, pensive work like this. So I found a piece from Brahms for the opening and then another by Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia for the end. We put them on the sound track and they felt 'right'.
Did a version of the documentary and sent it off for approval. Then waited, and waited some more.
Got a few reactions, modified the documentary, then sent it off again.
The wait had begun again.
Did a trial screening, decided to change a few more things.
Approval came.
Delighted/relieved.
Now 'finishing' the documentary.  

The Caregivers: Shooting: Final

'The Caregivers' was the first documentary I did in India after all the years of East Africa, especially Kenya.
The reason I mention this is because of the shooting formats. In Kenya, I was working on DV tape, mostly shooting HDV format, as that was the format that delivered the highest quality at the budgets the local market could afford.
'The Caregivers had to be done on 1920 x 1080, 50mbps bit rate. On video-tape this could only be done with the good-old Digi-Beta format, where the cameras are cheap to rent (being old!), but the cost of tapes are high. So I had to look at the non-tape formats of recording.
The easy option was Sony's XDCAM, in its full form not the XDCAM-EX format. This would meet the technical requirements of delivery while recording on S&S cards.
Typically the cards are given along side when you rent the camera. So, my camera rental got us a 64 GB card and a 32 GB one.
My problem was that I was shooting in Meerut and did not know any editing facility here. So with my team we went looking all over town. We found a place that is a rare edit only facility in Meerut- they had seven edit bays, but dealt primarily with wedding and event work. I didn't feel they were up to handling an experimental kind of documentary like 'The Caregivers', but at that point had no options. My chosen plan became to download and back-up the shot material here and then move to either Delhi or to Pune (to be closer to my wife and son).
A few days before shooting by some chance I landed up at Chimmera Animations, liked the guys running it and decided that I'd try and edit here.
It turned out that they had never edited on XDCAM or done broadcast work. So the camera person helped to set up all that for them, on the first day of shooting.
Then we set up a routine- we would shoot in the morning, then have lunch, after lunch land up at Chimmera to download and back-up our shot material, then move to the next location by four o'clock. This was still August, so in North India we got plenty of daylight hours to shoot and got to escape the afternoon heat. Terribly convinient all around.
All material was put on two one terrabyte hard drives, each backing up the other. Ordinary, consumer grade drives. We checked the professional Lacie drives, but they were just too expensive.
Last day of shooting meant we were now all set up for the next phase: the editing.

The Caregivers: Shooting 3: Keeping yourself open

On this documentary, I had written a detailed script, as I usually try to do. My plan is always to have strong base of a structure in place before shooting, so that at the time of shooting I can afford to be open to what is new.
Sometimes larger forces do play a role. One day before the shooting, I learned that Rahul Rastogi and his wife Shilpi were in town, but were due to leave before I shot the segment on Rahul's mother-Prabha Rastogi. So we quickly changed the schedule to incorporate Rahul into the shooting. It was to be the first day of the shooting, so there was a fair bit of chaos, getting into the 'groove' of working together for the whole unit. I had originally scheduled an easier segment to film, to allow for this adjustment process, but on a shooting, if you're getting something that makes one story richer- you have to re-schedule and go for it.
We got another example of this in the Arora story, where we missed filming an interview with the family's grandson on our scheduled day of filming. It was a blow, but as the boy was not around, there was nothing I could do. I had filmed alternatives to this story, but really wanted to use this story in the final structure. As it happened, two days later we were filming a shot in that area and learnt that the boy was around. So all else re-scheduled and we did his interview, which features prominently in the final segment.
Sometimes you have to comply with the timings of other people and institutions for getting a few shots, even though you can 'stage' the same shots easily at another time. This happened when we were called early morning to film a group that was meditating, we had returned late the evening before and were all tired, but I knew that with this group we couldn't 'stage'/'re-create' anything. All that we needed had to be filmed 'as it happened'. Well, we did get a few moments then that we could not have replicated no matter what we tried.
Ever done an interview where a dog came and sat in frame without making a noise? It happened to us when we were doing GS Bhatia's interview in his garden.  I couldn't use that bit in the final edit, but its there in the original material.
I wanted a visual of a new born, the unit and I couldn't line it up till the last day of filming. I had left the interviews with the doctors for the end, and after his interview Dr Sirohi asked if he could help in any way. It turned out that he and his wife are partners in a hospital, which had a ward for new borns. So we actually filmed the opening visual of the documentary as the last shot of the shooting.
That's the way it works in documentary filmmaking.

The Caregivers: Shooting 2:the gear

Come to think of it, we had a pretty small shooting kit. Let me try and recollect:

1. The camera-Sony PMW 200, with a regular tripod. Why did we use this camera? Our sponsors wanted us to use a camera that recorded  at a data rate of 50 mbps with a 4:2:2 colour sampling rate, at HD 1920 x 1080 lines, with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Plenty of cameras do this these days, but I wasn't keen on a dual system shooting, as we had no budget for a sound person. So it had to be a conventional video camera. The PMW series met all the requirements, this one came with two S&S cards, a 32 GB one and a 64 GB one. And it was a camera known to my cameraperson, so I said lets go for it. 
2. The sound gear was a Sony wireless lapel mike and a Sennhieser 416 'gun' mike. Both these came from a friendly rental house in Noida, Delhi, and were standard rental gear- battered and war weary, but did the job despite being held together by cello tape. We bought batteries for the wireless microphones every other day as in India people do not use re-chargeable batteries.
3. The lighting gear was a single one square foot LED panel. I liked the versatility of this light and it was battery powered, so easy to use. One single light proved ample for us, as we were shooting in late August when there is plenty of sunlight in North India. The light can be adjusted for daylight and indoors, so even more flexibility.
4. The lighting accessories: we bought thermocole sheets, plenty of translucent paper and black paper, along with black cloth and white cloth. Plus lots of clips to hang all these in various conditions. I think  the total expense on these was less than Re 500/-. All bought locally in Meerut. And to think that in Kenya I couldn't get these for love or for money! (more on that another day).

That was it for shooting gear.

OK, we had no lightboys or electricians, so anything more would have hiked up our costs. This much lighting gear our Assistant Cameraman could rig up with help from any of my students around.

Knowing this was the way we were going to be working, we used daylight carefully, shooting mainly in the morning and evening hours, when the light is a bit more angular.  No, we did not sleep in the afternoons, used that time to download our shot material.

The unit fitted into a rickety old Chevorlet Tavera with a driver who fancied himself as a rally driver. I took my father's old Maruti 800 around to the shoot. So it became a full unit with two vehicles.

Lunch, drinking water etc happened where it did, so no caterers get involved. It permitted the unit to sample Meerut's various food delicacies, of the vegetarian type.

Next up, planning and scheduling the shoot.

The Caregivers: Shooting:1

To filmmakers, shooting is that magical time where you 'see' more, 'experience' more, even when you're in the same spaces that you've always known.
In my case, when I work in non-fiction I also do the interviews (something for which I prepare but finally do away with all paper, relying on eye-contact to guide me). So I'm kind of tense as well as hyper sensitive to the surroundings.
To go back a bit, how do documentary makers actually prepare for shooting?
In this one I knew that I wanted to do all interviews in mid-shots, so that all people could be seen in their environments. I also knew that I wanted full colour at the beginning, and then slowly take away all the colour from the images towards the end. I explained that to my camera person, and then kind of relied on her knowledge of the camera's dynamic range and her sense of framing to actually execute the shots. Even though this was the first time we were working together, after the first morning I sort of worked in my usual fashion of describing the parameters of the frame and the direction of the look of the character in frame, and then letting the camera person control things from there.
The colour schemes actually turned out to be naturally as I had wanted them, that was the 'natural' state of affairs in the places that we filmed. So I've actually done very little colour correction in this documentary.
There is very little camera movement in the documentary, maybe two or three shots. I'd rather let the audience figure the details by themselves in the frame. The size of the 16:9 frame and the picture quality of the 4:2:2 colour resolution permits this, it wasn't possible in the HDV frames. An interesting corollary of this stylistic is that it permitted me to not take any classical establishing shots for the houses. I did shoot them but ended up not using them.
Maybe I need to do a few frame grabs to illustrate this point. The stills from the set convey something completely different.
There is only one close shot of a face in the whole documentary, and when that comes on screen, it gets a reaction- you almost want to flinch, turn away. When people react like that, I know we're doing something right.
Let me move to other aspects of shooting tomorrow.

The Caregivers: Pre-production: 2

The next step was to select a crew.
I knew I wanted to shoot in Meerut, so I first investigated getting a camera person from Delhi. The budget was too low to afford senior camerapersons, the others that I checked were much too unskilled for my liking. Finally, I turned to Mumbai, decided to stretch my budget, realising that it would be critical to get good visuals. Used my FTII networks to look for people, but till very near to the last dates was unable to get a person as Mumbai technicians get busy very quickly.
Eventually, I got Pooja Sharma, a young FTII alumni, came with very high recommendations as a documentary camera person. With her on-board, a few things fell into place- she got a camera she knew from Mumbai. (A Sony PMW-200 if you want to know).
The sound was destined to be an issue- the PSBT-DD Budget has no provision for a sound recording person. I borrowed sound equipment from a friend in Delhi, was hoping to get a record person too, but eventually could not afford one. So two students who had studied with me, (actors), stepped up and handled all the sound work. A friend doing the still photography, helped them out- he's a Meerut person, a cameraman in his own right.
Actually, still photographs were another problem- no provision for that in the budget but photographs required by contract. Finally, I bought a still camera and this friend helped out.
It ended up being two guys I had first hired who did the bulk of the work on the production. They are both Meerut natives (OK so am I but this was the first film I was doing in Meerut). Their local knowledge is immense and helped to move the production smoothly even when we had to change schedules. They got local vehicles at the best rates, knew what food would keep the unit moving, and all the tricks of production.
One of the challenges of shooting on card based cameras is that you need to download and back up your material as soon as possible. When we began, I had no clue to where to do this in Meerut, but then I ran into the young team at Chimmera Animation, we got along immediately. So Snigdh Bhatnagar handled all those issues, downloading and backing up material onto two drives. Later I created a third back up before editing began, so we were safe.
I hired one of my previous year's students as an AD, but my current class too came along to help and observe the shooting. So we ended up with a 'large' documentary unit.
That's the crew, now we move onto the shooting part.

The Caregivers: Pre-Production-1

Actually, it's a bit of a mis-normer to say that the script-writing ended and then we began the pre-production on any documentary.
The story of THE CAREGIVERS was no different.
The people I had originally wanted to film had passed away by the time I was preparing for the filming. In any case my vision of the documentary had grown since then, so I could afford to make the documentary without them.
I returned to Meerut in July, put together a team and began to look for 'characters' for my documentary. The key here is balance, you need to know how the characters will play against each other  and actively find 'characters' that will balance each other out.
Let me look at the family part of the documentary: I knew that I needed one 'regular' family with multiple generations under one roof, another family where caregiving needs had changed the very content of what is a family, and a third one where a person lived on their own, without any conflict in the family. The other consideration was the allied characters, who else was around, what could be asked of them, how would they respond.
After I had a short list of families ready, each duly photographed along with their living environments, my students and I wrote out a list of the characters in each family and the questions to be asked of them. So we were ready for this sector, though I did film more families than what finally appears on-screen.
The old age homes were simpler to find, though I opted to take one with a religious orientation and another with a purely 'commercial' approach. Step two was to find 'characters' in the old age homes. In one it was pretty simple, with the help of the management, we identified three characters. In the other home we couldn't find any, finally the manager lined up two people who he felt could talk without breaking apart. Again, photographs taken, questions written down with my students and we were set.
I could not find the doctors till the last minute, for the psychiatrist I finally found a student of my mother's, with multiple connections to my family. The medical doctor was actually found by a local TV Channel host, who is himself a medical doctor by profession. The medical doctor prepared extremely hard for his interview, and finally gave me so much extra information that I could find the ending to the documentary from his interview.
I did interview several destitute elderly too, but somehow it did not work in the edit.
Certain things changed- for example, I had originally thought of this documentary as a local one raising international issues. But then, I cut out the local city references totally and somehow it became a more universal film.
I thought of adding more 'diversity' to the characters, sort of balance it out in terms of population make up of our filming area. But finally the lack of access (which I've discussed elsewhere) and the desire to tap into more universal issues prevailed.
You can now see the 'form' or the basic structure of the documentary coming together.

The Caregivers: script: the process

My students keep asking me about the process: how you go from the idea to a script. Let me try and describe the process as I experienced it on The Caregivers.
I had an idea that caregivers were interesting characters, especially in the relationships that developed between them and the people they cared for. That was the beginning point.
As I began to do research into the elderly in India, as well caregivers, I realised that I was dealing with a far larger problem- no one realised the sheer numbers of the elderly in India, nor did anyone have a clue as to what exactly was ageing- what happened to the human body as it aged. Then there was the whole range of caregiving- within the family, sometimes changing the very dynamics of the family, the external caregivers coming in, the old age homes, and the severe shortage of all these options for the majority of the elderly.
My problem as a filmmaker was also how to integrate all this into one coherent structure, a documentary that an audience could grasp.
My basic solution was three fold:

• To do not one or two but several different stories of caregiving for the elderly, showing the diversity of home based caregiving.
• To show old age homes as the final option for the elderly.
• To interview a medical doctor and a medical psychiatrist and use excerpts from those interviews as the dividers between the different stories of the elderly.

I started out with these basic structural points. 

The problem was that this gave me no beginning or ending to the documentary. I needed to figure them out.

The begining came in the writing stage - I sort of knew that I needed to show the cycles of life here- from birth onto growing old. So I wrote a sequence that illustrated that.

The ending was known to me too- it had to end with death, a river, an elderly man looking at the river flowing by. I knew that this had to be the Ganga at Garhmukteshwar, a view not many non-Meerut people have ever seen.

Based on these core facts, I started looking at families and individuals. 

But that's the next step. In terms of writing, this is the process I went through.

The Caregivers: The script

In any form of documentary filmmaking, the script is at best a guide to the final film that will emerge. In the way I, and I am sure a lot of other filmmakers, work is to research an idea thoroughly until the contours, the highlights of the subject start showing up. Then on its a matter of finding the 'appropriate' manner of depicting these high points, and further to linking them up in a structure that holds an audience's attention.
This highly theoretical summary of the process of scriptwriting or finding the 'form' of a documentary in no way depicts how we filmmakers actually work, the frustrations and the struggle involved.
To go back to the point where I was in the last post: I was in Pune when I heard that I had got the documentary to make. There's plenty of activity in the area of ageing in Pune, but ..
The first thing I knew was that I had to be back in Meerut.
Why?
 Because in Meerut, I understand every nuance of every word that is uttered by a person.  In Pune, nuances of meaning expressed by people can be appreciated in Marathi, not by a Hindi speaker like me. To add to that I have family and friends here, so I knew it would be easier to find my 'subjects'/ 'characters' here.
So I booked a ticket to Meerut and began my research into ageing and caregiving for the elderly on the internet.  It soon became clear that there were far bigger problems relating to ageing that were all over the particular issue of caregiving that was my initial subject. I had to show the bigger problems to put my concerns of caregiving into a perspective.
So I landed in Meerut, had my teaching assignments at the local film school, and soon assembled a small team to help find 'characters'/'subjects' for the documentary.
I had always looked at my subject as being ageing and caregiving in the broadest sense of the word and not confined to any geographic area or culture. But to me, the nuances of being in one area and expressing its truth are what are going to make my approach universal. Its from the local that the universal will emerge.
I put all this down into the form of notes for a script and sent it off for approval, while continuing to work on how to put all of my research on-screen.
The script came back with lots of notes- I was called a narrow minded 'cow-belt wallah' by an Anglised gentleman with attitudes from the last century.
Anyway, I wrote another draft to the script, got it approved and began moving towards production.
I knew by this time that I was telling stories of families, of family based caregiving, of people living on their own and moving on to old age homes and eventually the homeless. To give the film a perspective, I was going to intercut these stories with interviews of a medical doctor and a psychiatrist talking about ageing and caregiving.
To me, this became a documentary from the age of Google and free flowing information. More on all that soon.

The Caregivers:origins

'The Caregivers' is the title of a documentary that I'm making under a Doordarshan- PSBT (Public Service Broadcasting Trust) 'fellowship'. Over the next few blog posts, I'll try and run you through the process of making this documentary. These posts will have some material that will be repeated from the Facebook page of the documentary. To those of you who do not know this page, its at <www.facebook.com/documentarythecaregivers>.
I have applied, unsuccessfully, to PSBT a few times. So when I saw the call for proposals for 2014, I was a bit sceptical. But finally, I did send a few proposals to them, under various schemes.
The Caregivers grew out of my personal position: I'm here in my hometown of Meerut, UP, looking after my mother, who is now 86. Naturally, her friends and my larger family are all people who are ageing  (OK, technically we are all ageing with each breath that we take). Quite a few of the people were also living on their own, both with and without 'hired' caregivers.
Having seen these people when they were younger, and now suddenly seeing them as 'old' was an emotionally charged experience for me. As I observed all the people around and slowly figured the complex relationships they had with their caregivers, I thought that here was a documentary waiting to be made.
So I proposed this to PSBT: to make a documentary on caregivers to the elderly.
Months passed, as did various deadlines for decisions. I assumed that I was no longer in the running as in most of the film-making world, a 'no reply' means rejection. Though in March 2014, I had been asked to re-submit the project with a budget for shooting on HD, which I did. But again, matters went silent.
In June, 2014, I was in Pune, as an Examiner for student films at an institute, when an old friend called me to say that the PSBT list is out and I think you're on it. I said I would check the website later in the day. A few hours later, I got a call from PSBT asking me to lower the budget of the project and re-submit. I said I was busy but would do it over the next few days.
I re-did the budget, sent it off and soon got a letter saying I had been given the documentary to make.
So of course, I was euphoric.
Then came the next step, the script.

Social Meaning of media

I’m currently in Pune, Maharastra, India, and the last week has seen riots in the streets twice over Facebook and Whatsapp posts. So the atmosphere is very much that the social media has stepped out into the streets from the computers or phones where it usually resides. I’ve always been a believed that anything on social media is like speaking in public, one needs to be aware of what one says and its possible implications. But how do you explain that to someone who is sitting in comparative isolation and feels that by posting something on social media, he/she is simply ‘expressing their opinion’, which is their birthright in a democracy.
The point came home to me when assessing a student project, on a rather controversial subject. A very well made, mature film. But a film made by a student who typically  feels that a student film has no ‘social impact’. The problem was- do you now act like Censor Board and ‘ban’ the work, sort of suppress it from circulation.  Or do you help the student arrive at a realisation of his position and work with him to sort of ‘neutralise’ the impact of the work?
As the assessing Jury, my colleagues and I opted to take the latter path.
Which turned out to be trickier than we thought. Without going into details, lets say the student filmmaker now has a chance to do something about the social impact of his film.
Made me wonder if all filmmakers are actually aware of the social implications of their work? A lot of them are aware, in fact they play on the expectations that their carefully worked out images and sounds have. I’m thinking of Lars Von Trier’s work where he is acutely aware of and indeed playing with the way society at large and cinema going audiences perceive of his work.
But in India, with our hugely diverse population with its diverse beliefs, differing levels of tolerance, the role gets very complicated. Its very difficult to predict with the stories that filmmakers tell as to how people will react to them. There are alternatives in terms of filmmaking, to make work like our classical ‘commercial movie’ that is designed to offend no one. But is that the only alternative?
Or do we really need to think about this, we are a democracy, so you can think or write anything.
I wish I knew the answers, if indeed they exist. Seems to me that you need to be constantly defining and re-defining your boundaries. Tricky, very tricky, but the only option to positing a single, monolithic position as the truth. 

The last piece in this was written a long time ago.
Feels even longer as in the interim, I’ve completed a documentary and a feature film script, taught a lot, and after a long long time ‘grounded’ myself into a place and a culture- well, I grew up there so it wasn’t tough. In a sense I’ve grown and changed a lot more in the past few months than I have in a while.
Is that what I’m going to write about, the changes? No not really, I don’t think I can fully appreciate them myself at the moment. In any case I have always had a dislike for talking matters personal- I know they are there but its just difficult for me to talk about them.
For the moment, I think I need to talk about the making of the documentary. After that possibly the writing of the script. Then when I’m kind of up-to-date, I’ll decide what to write about.
Somewhere down the line I will have to discuss my teaching ventures as my students opened out new vistas for me- showing me what I was missing out on in Indian Cinema, particularly its popular genres. And my nephew filled me in on non-traditional Hindi cinema.
My non-Meerut students filled me on new international cinema, about which they knew a lot more than I do, so somewhere I will acknowledge their debt.

That’s an agenda I guess. Hope it doesn’t go the way of New Year resolutions.