So You win, Dead Walking

So You win, Dead Walking

Indian Holocaust My Father`s Life and Time - SEVENTY

Palash Biswas



Sir, please take this truth.
Buy one
Get one free!
Shall we start online with the legal truth?

Ramchandra Yadav does not exist legally..

True?

Absolutely!
So, you win this chapati free,
Absolutely free!

By Joshy Joseph


Joshy is a prominent filmmaker who has bagged several national awards. He is known as a specialist on North east. But his latest venture is shot in North india, the heart land which is famous for all the nonsense. Walking Dead goes far beyond its physical reality. It depicts one of the most bizarre tales of the last and present century where a man has to fight for 30-35 years to retrieve the original ownership of land that was grabbed from him on the grounds that he was “dead”. It is a serious, very serious human rights affair and neglected by the Human Rights organs very active in North India itself. It is shocking. Really very shocking. All these nonsense goes in a democracy. It is a shame, a national shame. I am thankful to Joshy that he made us look into the matter. NOT an odd individual or twosome, several hundreds of people in Azamgarrh district of Uttar Pradesh are fighting to prove that they happen to be alive. As a lens eye witness Joshy has successfully put up the case and as friends we are proud of our promising friend.

I had never thought in my wildest dream to be involved in a complex medium like cinema. I had no scope at all. The scenarios changed suddenly when my college-days friend Rajiv Kumar joined film division as a director. He had been in Pune film institute and assisted Kumar sahni in Mumbai. we met as old friend. One night he dropped in my office and discussed his film on Jehanabad massacre at length. Whatever I knew about the field reality, I told him. He persuaded me to got to Jehanabad for shooting . I denied. Then he got a national award for the film. He convinced me to write comm entry for his next documentary film. I had to do. Rajiv continued to insist and I had to write the script, dialogue and screenplay for his first feature film `Vasseyat’. I had to be there in Banaras for the outdoor shooting.

Rajiv Introduced me to joshy Joseph, a young, energetic dreamer from remote Kerala Island who happens to be another director in the film division. Rajiv`s father was the deputy Collector in Nainital and I had always a hitch to mix up with them. It is Rajiv who created an inevitable dialogue between us in Nainital while we all were involved in yug Manch, a theatre group in Nainital. In fact, all Yugmanch old boys scattered countrywide gathered to do Rajiv`s first film and we chose Girda in the lead role. Thus, I was involved in cinema at last.
While I saw Joshy`s Bamboo Blooms an excellent aesthetic attempt with very strong content, I could not resist to speak out, ` hey Joshy, I want to do a film with you.’ Joshy got me for his first feature film Imagainary Line based on Manipur and north east realities.

Joshy is always a thinker. I was always tired of his habit to change the script anytime. In Imaginary Line we had to change the entire dialogue when we met an artist on the street. He continued to change. During dialogue writing, shooting, editing and even during dubbing. I remember that he took a full night to shoot a single shot on soliloquy of the protagonist, played by Gautam Halder. There was no frame at all. Gautam was given maximum liberty to express himself. It was a very cool night atop Morem Kulaain Hills. The cameraman was on the crane fighting to fix a frame. Gautam was in the arena. Joshy and me were in the background while the entire unit was defending themselves from the stings of cold. We had to work day and night as the situation in Naga dominated Hills of Manipur were very explosive. We had to show the rushes to the locals every time and only then they would allow us to continue. We did not get any security from the state. Shooting had been interrupted so many time amid exciting debates. But we were able to convince the Nagas that we represent them.

So I know the commitment and working style of Joshy very well. he was thinking about Walking dead while we were finalising the plans about Imaginary lines in 2000. We shot the film in 2001. Meanwhile he did several short films including a really big one , One Day From a Hangman`s Life which created lots of controversy and Joshy shot into fame. All these days he was thinking Dead Walking. Me and Rajiv Kumar and some other friends witnessed his creative pain.And at last he delivered. I could not assist him in any of his other films as because it became harder to get leave. Joshy wants time and space to work and everyone may not work. Joshy is very particular about his cast and unit. In Manipur, I had to assist the unit manager to satisfy his passion for perfection. Razak Kottakkal is a long time associate of Joshy and he understands well the aesthetics of Joshy. He was the man behind camera in Imaginary Lines and he happens to be in the same status in Dead Walking. Chandan roy Chowdhury helps a lot in a different landscape with his music.PC Thakur is once again the Production Controller.

I am very very interested what my two friends Rajiv and Joshy do. Dead walking interested a little more as I belong originally to united UP and am aware of the top to bottom corruption in matters related revenue department. Land reforms mean nothing in the feudal set up of North India. We see often bloody resistance in Bihar. But elsewhere, nothing may stop the game for the powerful who rein over Rural India. joshy exposed all this in this film Dead Walking. CPI-M hesitated and eventually pulled back Jyoti Basu from the prime minister ship of India as it realised that land reforms in North India are quite impossible. At that time the Left would not think to deviate from its ideological base. The stance is transformed in pro capitalist and pro imperialist corporate stance.This time Joshy is in a UP district azamgargh contrarily to his favourite landscape of North East. He chose a different human scape and a different culture. Azamgarh is 220 km southeast of Lucknow, the state capital, and Joseph’s film deals with the officially “dead” men of the district who are desperately trying to prove they are very much alive. They’ve been declared dead because their relatives and family members want to grab their land and this is the easiest end to achieving the means. Joshy understands the difference very well and it is well expressed in the film.

I am happy that my friend could not change his stance. This film begins with an idea reading newspaper reporting about Dead`s Union in UP. Joshy worked as an investigative journalist and busted the system without any mercy. I am amazed to see the use of poetry in this film. he used ryme in Bamboo blooms. He made me write a dialogue in Imagainary life which has to be tried in a drunk or semi drunk mood. We used soliloquies and the study of Shakespeare helped me a lot.

I should spell another excellent short film by Joshy Joseph to understand his metal as a film maker and the film is, Wearing Faces’. His films are never typical film division films. In this film joshy put the army action on celluloid. Even in Imaginary Line he never missed a shot to show the military presence in northeast.

Joshy got a rare opportunity of exposure in his latest venture. He used poetry, folk and myth. His music and dialogues seems so funny and full of satire. He has become an excellent actor, I must accept. His accent had been always with single stress and paced super fast. But he somehow adapted a north Indian accent and is never seen an outsider in azamgargh villages. He did an excellent home work for case studies and documentation. But he is also very mythical while using folk song and the smoking tree. He is rather classical when he portrays Kaifi Azmi poetry.

I would like to name another short film by Joshy— Sarang — Symphony in Cacophony (English), has been judged the Best Promotional Film. Directed by Joshy Joseph, the film has been awarded for its inspiring documentary about a young couple’s commitment to revive [a] valley through organic farming. He used Gautam and Sohini Haldar in his very short film Mobile. Sohini using mobile phone on a kolkata Rickshaw pulled by man pin points the focus on content, a burning question mark on globalisation and development.

Joshy is always very particular with his visuals. dialogues or No dialogues , Joshy wants to expose everything via lens. His excellent aesthetic sense roots in his Malayalam roots, though he had been assisting a master filmmaker like Adoor Gopalkrishnan.

The hangman film, wherein he essayed a day in the life of Nata Mullick, the man vested with the responsibility of putting the noose on Dhananjoy Chatterjee. The film met with a sudden ban from the state government but its eventual public release created a storm among documentary filmmakers in Kolkata, thereby making a name for its maker, is one in which he does not depend on visuals as usual.In One Day From A Hangman’s Life the filmmaker tries to de-fictionalise the non-fiction by retreating into the dingy cell-like room of the hangman for a whole day before the hanging. The film adopts an observant style with its lengthy shots, unlike the 60 seconds commercial which may tell us everything about a car but I it crosses that 60 seconds, it may have to tell you the truth about the car, is a long story and I trespassed into everything in this process for touching the moment of truth. Joshy did not comment on death penalty but the film stimulated a hot, very hot debate breaking borders. This is the style of Joshy. He never poses to be loud. he always wants thing very aesthetically and sticks on to the language of camera.

I told joshy that the film seems rather somewhat patchy in a span of forty minutes about. I know him and know his style. It is quite unlike Joshy who rather says everything on very fast pitch. But he is busy with the dead with all the background with entire social network. When he emerges to deal with the corrupt polity, he uses poetry as a sharp tool of resistance. He exposes the Indian revenue system and land relations mercilessly. And he enjoys it like a killer. The election episode with all its pathos and melody is an asset to be reserved in archives of Indian Cinema. Kidnapping the little girl, trying to bribe the police and contesting Loksabha election- every thing , yes everything intensify the struggle of the dead to ensure the human right to walk.

Dead do not walk.
Dead do not talk.

But it happens in Rural India. You have to prove that you are alive. You may be alive and enjoy civil and human rights but you may not inherit a property or claim a piece of your land as the official files show you dead. The judicial system takes a long time. You may get older and eventually die. Joshy portrays all possible attempts by dead to live up in this corrupt world.Joshy ’s documentary of the same name is a vividly revealing account of what actually happens in Uttar Pradesh’s Azamgarh district and how it’s all so easy if the right palms are greased.

The film reminds one of Tagore’s famous story, Jeebito O Mrito, (1904) where Kadambini, a young widow who’s given up for dead, walks back into her home only to be taken for a ghost. To prove she didn’t die, Kadambini jumps into the pond near the house, giving birth to Tagore’s famous line: Kadambini moriya promaan korilo shey morey naai, meaning, Kadambini died to prove that she was alive.

Azamgarh, interestingly, happens to be the birthplace of one of the most renowned Urdu poets of the country – Kaifi Azmi. It is also the place from where underworld don Abu Salem’s filing of his nomination papers for the Parliamentary elections in October this year met with massive public response.

The states man, Kolkata, publishes a cover story WALKING DEAD in its literary supplement 8th Day. Shoma A Chatterji reports:

.....This continues to happen in the world’s largest democracy and we do not even know about it.

....Walking Dead is the outcome of three years of research, its title the exact translation of its shocking content. Shot in natural light without dubbing, Joshy, with his camera, journeys through the streets, alleys and homes of Azamgarh to trace the roots of this believe-it-or-not story in 21st century India. He talks, for example, to Lal Behari “Mritak”, declared dead 19 years ago in revenue papers. Lal Behari filed his nomination three times. During his unfortunate experience, he discovered that more than 10,000 people had been falsely declared dead in Uttar Pradesh alone.
Behari, who added “Mritak” to his name in 1980, said he wanted to bring to the fore the plight of several others like him. He discovered he had been declared “dead” by an uncle when he applied for a bank loan way back in 1975. He then founded the Mritak Sangh, an association of dead People (who are actually alive). It had a membership of 300-400 people but not all of them were active enough to take the movement further. The story first drew media attention when Time magazine flashed it in 1989 in an article by Michael Fathers that was picked up later by the print media in Australia and Zimbabwe.
Journalist Bibek Deb Roy adds that Allahabad High Court took suo motu notice of the Time report and Justices Dhawan and Dikshit directed the district administration to pool information on “officially” dead people and place it before the district’s Chief Judicial Magistrate. An exercise conducted in September 1999 identified 80 cases of “dead” people, of who 30 were resurrected but only four managed to retrieve their land. In other words, it is tougher for X to prove that he is alive than for Y to declare that X is dead even though he is alive!“I tried everything from standing for Parliament elections, attracting contempt of court charges, writing pamphlets, organising my own funeral, demanding widow pension for my wife and adding the prefix Mritak to my name. It took me 19 long and painful years, from 1975 to 1994, to prove that I was alive, thanks to help from the District Magistrate,” Lal Behari elucidates while explaining what turned him into the champion for 10,000 living dead in Azamgarh.
“Can you even believe that Lal Behari contested three Parliamentary elections, one against Rajiv Gandhi in Allahabad, one against VP Singh and the third against another Mritak Ramdas Yadav. And he did all this just to prove his point. Just imagine an ordinary man, declared ‘dead’, fighting the Prime Minister of the country! For his long struggle in resurrecting himself from the ‘dead’, he won the parallel Noble Prize called the Ig Nobel Prize for Peace in 2003,” adds Joseph. Lal Behari does not add Mritak to his name now.
Asked what motivated him to make this film, Jospeh says, “I got to know about this six years ago through a newspaper story. The idea had remained with me but I was waiting for the right opportunity to strike. Then I happened to attend a one-week script-writing workshop in Delhi in 2001 conducted by the legendary Jean-Claude Carriere and organised by the French Embassy. We were 16 participants. I was chosen for another script for a feature film. But I suggested this idea for a feature film. Carriere suggested I make a documentary on the same subject. My script idea was chosen the best in the workshop. I met no less than 100 characters and I got to know them closely during the research. They were all ‘assassinated’ on paper and appeared to be scared of media attention.”
Walking Dead meets others, too, such as a spiritual leader, Paltan Yadav Mritak. He is a poet and a storyteller whose quotations and philosophical outpourings are fascinating. He had gone away for 25 years and when he returned he had already been declared “dead” and is still fighting to prove that he is alive. He wears saffron robes, sports a long and unkempt beard and mouths wonderful chantings from the scriptures. “I took him to Benares and let him talk about the other world that he is so fond of narrating,” says Joseph. The film does not use a voice-over and allows the interviewees to talk in their natural voice. “I first decided to shoot on 35 mm but shifted to a digital set-up so that they were not conscious of the camera. The trick worked and I managed long candid shots.”
Paltan Yadav functions both as character and metaphor in the film, dotting it with an ironical but unsaid comment on the destiny of man in life and death.
As he scoured the nooks and corners of Azamgarh that has around 17 towns but only 25-odd police stations to man a population of four million, Joseph met Jagadish, who is among the official dead but does not belong to the Mritak Sangh. “I discovered that his relatives had appropriated his land. The court judgment later declared ‘the applicant has also died’. Can you believe this?” asks a laughing Joseph.
The first half of this longish documentary took Joseph 45 days of shooting and one year of post-production work. It tends to drag at times, catching the interviewees in their day-to-day chores, such as getting a shave at a haircutting saloon, and so on. But Joseph explains that he has kept the footage long by design because “I did it for theatre screening on the large format and also because I was convinced that I would not have argued out my point with a shorter film. I befriended them in a way that made them ignore the camera completely and I could shoot them candidly. I gave them cordless microphones, so, except for long recitations, dubbing was superfluous. I had decided not to use a voice-over by allowing them to speak as they naturally did.”
In one of the most bizarre cases of human rights violations, this virtually amounts to murder without shedding a single drop of blood. With four million people living on 4,234 square km of land, Azamgarh is wracked by the devastating reality of the supply of land being far below the demand for it. Add to this the natural and filial realities of subdivision and fragmentation leading to very small plots of land divided among many family members. The temptation to grab land from an absentee uncle, or ailing grandmother, or illiterate widow is strong enough for relatives to barrel on without a qualm. The job is not very difficult, thanks to a corrupt system where land records officials are at one’s beck and call if their palms are greased with anything between Rs 50 and Rs 2,000, depending on the size of the land, among other things. All one has to do is to have a relative declared “dead” and grab his/her share of the property. One has actually committed murder but as this is only on paper, there is no law in the land that can place one behind bars!
The film details, through close-ups of official documents, how easy it is to obtain a death certificate in Azamgarh under the Registration of Births and Deaths Act of 1969. An application, a medical certificate confirming death, an affidavit and a copy of a ration card (or other proof of identity) of the applicant. Technically, the police station is supposed to check before a death certificate is issued. But, presumably, corruption takes care of that. The more serious issue is the subsequent fraudulent registration of agricultural land.
“As far as I could make out, the Registration Act of 1908 and accompanying rules cover this and these also provide for penalties (imprisonment up to seven years) for fraudulent registration by Registration Officers,” says Joseph. Sixteen revenue officials were found guilty in the September 1999 exercise but no one knows whether they were punished or not.




At the end of the day… the TRP ….the circulation… the vote bank and the sale matter, either from a drink or from a spray or from both
Film on hangman to rekindle debate on capital punishment


KOLKATA, AUG. 22. In a chilling commentary against what he calls the glorification of capital punishment by the media and the sudden `personal' interest of the West Bengal government in the execution of murder and rape convict Dhananjoy Chatterjee, a film maker here has put together a film that seeks to rekindle the big debate on the issue.

Titled `One Day From a Hangman's Life', the hour-long documentary film by four-time national award winning director Joshy Joseph captures hangman Nata Mallik in his many hues -- as a needy man encashing his sound bytes, as a seasoned actor who knows what adds punch to a TV interview and as the head of a family worried about the future of his progeny.

But beneath its biographical veneer, the documentary tries to point a finger at the `media's lopsided projection' of an execution and iconisation of a hangman, who even shared a public forum with Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee's wife suggesting, in Joseph's words, the state's personal involvement in the whole affair.

Shot on June 23, the eve of the first official date announced for Chatterjee's hanging (later deferred when the President reconsidered his mercy plea), the action takes place mostly within a dingy 10X8 room in Mallik's south Kolkata residence, the media's most frequented destination for about two months preceding Chatterjee's dramatic execution on August 14.

``This is an attempt to reflect upon just one day in Mallik's life, this particular hanging which occupied reams of newsprint and hours of prime time and the debate on capital punishment that died down the very next day of the hanging,'' Joseph, winner of four consecutive national awards in the non-fiction category since 1998 told PTI.

The film begins with a shot of Mallik at 9:30 am on June 23 lighting his favourite brand of cigarette and gearing up for a day that would have ended in an execution in its late hours.

It builds up the tension and ends in a typical anti-climax when Mallik is informed that the hanging is cancelled.

``Though he keeps repeating his rehearsed lines in front of umpteen cameras throughout the day saying it is a government job and he is simply carrying out their orders, you can actually see a crestfallen man at twilight when he hears that his services will not be required tomorrow,'' Joseph says.

Indulging in a little sting operation, cameraman Razak Kottakkal switched off the lights midway and posed not to be shooting.

Mallik was then seen in his real colours. ``Dekho koi khabarwallah bahar hai ki nahin? (Is there any mediaman outside?),'' he is seen asking his son while gesticulating for money. ``Police wallah ko phone karo jana hai ki nahin (Call the police and ask if we have to go).''

He follows it up with an utter sense of desparation.''Aaj raat ko thoda jyada peena padega. Nahin to neend nahin ayegi. (I will have to drink a little more tonight. Or else I'll not get any sleep).''

From deals in alcohol and cash to a news channel's futile negotiation with Mallik's son Mahadev to carry a hidden camera into the Alipore Central Jail on the day of hanging against a massive payment, Joseph captures the media's 'insensitive' handling of one of the of most talked about executions in recent times.

``What is the difference between us and countries which allow public hanging if we want to show the gory details of an execution on television? What is the media trying to show when they ask the hangman to recount all the macabre details with 'zordar' (strong) dialogues?'' Joseph asks.

Mallik's unusual puja for his dead father and scores of Hindu deities adorning his room with raw rum for prasad and burnt cigarettes in place of incense sticks make for repelling visuals.

Providing the much needed comic relief in the otherwise grim narrative are Mallik's one-liners like `thik hai hamara dialogue' (is my dialogue okay) and `pasina ka daam hai ki nahin' (does my sweat have a price or not?).

The hangman cooks up fiction at the drop of a hat. ``Do you know that this young girl (Hetal Parekh) was so brutally raped and killed that her father committed suicide and her family went mad begging on the streets?'' Mallik says in the film while trying to justify the punishment meted out to the convict.

``I got interested since he had become a cult figure in the media. He was camera-friendly and well tuned to the entire process of 'media hanging'...he would give bytes as per the individual requirements of media houses. That made for a great subject,'' Joseph says. The director draws an analogy to establish Mallik's acting streak from a film footage of Mrinal Sen's 'Mrigaya' where the hangman played himself.


- PTI