When I boarded the plane for Pune on 5th January 2011, my excitement knew no bounds. Besides the fact that i was going for my first ever out-station shoot, two additional factors contributed to this:
a) The three days of shoot in Delhi had given me a taste of what it feels like to be on ‘the sets’ and I totally loved it. Going to Pune was going to be awesome fun and being in an outdoor shoot was going to be double/triple the fun.
b) It was freakin cold in Delhi and Pune at 29 degrees was practically like summer!
Honestly, I never thought too much about Pune. I had never been there and it wasn’t like I was dying to go there like Kerala or Ladakh. I always thought it would be like any other small town in the process of turning into a city. I wasn’t expecting much. But I was totally wrong. I fell in love with Pune from the moment we met the driver who had come to pick us up at the airport. This blog entry is in fact a small homage to Mahavir-who loved to eat, loved music, loved life and most importantly loved Pune and everything about it. His enthusiasm and his love for the city made us fall in love with it too. He struck a chord with us from the moment he took us to this obscure place called Durga Bhuwan, where the three of us devoured the most awesome Biryani ever.
We would’ve never found this place on our own. We were so happy with him we told the cab company to send him the next day too.
The first two days were spent just moving around the city and meeting the people we would be interviewing. And since the film was about a topic as sensitive as schizophrenia, the three of us left Delhi with a determination of seriousness. In fact I had started being pensive from the moment I stepped on the plane. But all this changed the moment we met our protagonist.She was, is, the opposite of everything you will expect from someone ‘suffering’ from schizophrenia. She’s an amazing artist and one of the coolest people I’ve ever met with plenty of stories to keep me hooked.
I was nervous about the shoot to say the least. The three-days shoot in Delhi was fun for me because I was working with people I already knew and I knew in the back of my head that if something went wrong they would be there to make it right. But in Pune, I would have had to handle everything on my own.
As is normal in a shoot, several things did go wrong; from the fact that the equipment we had asked not being there to cultural differences with the local crew. Yes, I did have headaches and lost my cool several times and yes I did pick up a piece of glass from the garbage because all glass shops were closed in pune, never mind it was never used; but when we packed up on the 9th, I can say for sure that I had understood the things that goes behind managing a shoot a whole lot better, even in a place I had never been to before.
I am proud of myself!
