We were four people travelling together

.. city to city, tracing Phalke.

Hansa, Rahul, Saikat and I, once in a while Ganesh and Renu would join us. All of us had, at different times, spent a few years studying and watching films at the Film and Television Institute of India.

Before taking to the road, we had put a whole lot of information about Phalke on our website, built like a wikipedia. This was material needed for our workshops.

We took a camera to trace the journey we were setting out on. Anybody could shoot anything; books being scanned, printouts making towers on printer trays, suitcases being filled books, CD's and Xeroxed 'course' material for each participant, getting a taxi, the road to Nasik. Associations, forged connections, the changing landscapes, faces, gas stations, motels, advertisements, decorations, trying to link the old with the new.. taking linear, non linear approaches, never losing sight of the idea of ageing. I never forgot that I was least skilled amongst all. Everybody called me Kamalji.

At Nasik we stayed in a hotel overlooking the banks of the Godavari river. With a telelens, we could easily peep into numbers of houses, the temple premises, watch over markets immersed in the business of buying, follow a swimmer. This is the place where the "Kumbha' happens every twelve years. Phalke documented it in the year 1916.

We were a group of 25 participants in the beginning, younger ones from School of Architecture and the others from various sections of Nasik society. Writers, painters, engineers, politicians and.. curious about 'Phalke' from Trimbakeshvar, Nasik, father of Indian cinema.

To begin with, we had covered the walls with Xeroxed pages from the Phalke book. It was our own kind of wall painting. The room looked like a story box. In Nasik, most of the participants were from 'Story box', a cultural organisation that was hosting our workshop. Rahul, who had taken me around Nasik before, and with whom I had intensively planned the workshop, knew what we were doing. To the others, the idea of our workshop seemed vague.. what were they supposed to do?

We started our workshop by reading the document "Bees Raniyon ka Bioscope" , explaining the process of disseminating the Phalke Book into five Phalke cities, then networking them territorially and arriving at a 'Phalke Story Board'.

Our workshop was to generate Phalke's stories from Phalke's life and times in Nasik city, his childhood, the times when he was making films, the time when he was an old man in the city of his childhood.