We were four people travelling together

.. city to city, tracing Phalke. Hansa, Rahul, Saikat and I, once in a while Ganesh and Renu used to join us. All of us FTII fellows. 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.

From the beginning we decided to video record our journey. Anybody could shoot anything; books beign scanned, nonstop printouts emerging from printers, loading suitcases with books, CD's and Xeroxed course books for each participant, getting a taxi, the road to Nasik. Associations, connections, changing landscapes, faces, Gas stations, motels, advertisements, decorations, trying to link the old with the new, taking linear, non linear approaches, but 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 Godavari. With a telelens, we could easily peep into numbers of houses, the temple premises, watch over a buying markets, follow a swimmer. This is the place where the "Kumbha' happnes ever twelve years. Phalke documented it in the year 1916.