After the flood
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COMMENTS 
Filmmaker Ashoke Pandit's documentary on the July 2005 deluge in Mumbai attempts to jolt Mumbai's civic administration out of its slumber
Last year, Mumbaikars were caught unprepared when the monsoon arrived a week earlier than predicted. This year, the rains have been delayed.
But, as filmmaker Ashoke Pandit views it, it's not the timing that's important but the state of preparedness that Mumbai's governing bodies are in, to prevent a recurrence of what happened on July 26, 2005, when the entire city was almost submerged, causing unaccountable loss of life and property. Even now, recalling those harrowing moments when he saw people around him helplessly trying to save their families, friends and possessions, Pandit gets goose bumps. "I was stranded in Santa Cruz in my car, in chest-deep water, and all I could see were the smiling faces of our politicians looking down on us from hoardings. It was such a quirk of fate that while the whole city drowned, all that the citizens could see by way of an administrative presence were those hoardings and banners. What every Mumbaikar experienced on that day was an explicit example of carelessness leading to catastrophe," he says.
Unable to simply sit back and be a passive observer, Pandit somehow managed to get home that day and then rushed out again with his video camera to record the plight of those who were simply unable to fight the force of the water that had entered their homes. Those images and sound bites have led to the making of a documentary titled Paani that Pandit wants local organisations and activist groups to screen, to showcase gaps in the system and highlight how the entire situation could have been controlled had the administrators done their job efficiently. "The film is my appeal to those in power to take note of the causes that led to this man-made disaster and to ask them about their preparations to avoid any more 26/7s," Pandit explains.
Paani is a film created out of a series of images and interviews depicting how a city can become so vulnerable in the face of a natural disaster, while placing the blame squarely at the doorstep of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation.
The film is structured out of a collage of shots -- of people trying to find a spot of dryness in a city engulfed with water, of newspaper clippings pointing out the apathy of the city's governing bodies, of sound and visual bites borrowed from television channel reportage and interviews with victims, many of whom broke down while recalling those terrible moments.
Interestingly, Pandit dedicates his documentary to the media. His reasoning for doing so is: "It was the media that reached all those places where even the system could not reach. Had it not been for the media, the politicians would never have woken up to confront the results of their ignorance. It was the media's active reporting that brought the politicians to work, which they should have done long back." Comparing the 26/7 incident to the World Trade Centre attack on September 11, Pandit says he wants his film to make as much of an impact and stir the collective conscience as did Fahrenheit 9/11, made in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. "What happened on 26/7 is not a thing of the past. The rate at which new roads are being built on an elevated level, the water is going to seep into buildings at the first instance of heavy rain. Each time the calamity could become bigger," he says.
For Pandit, putting together the documentary was quite a different experience from making a feature film. He has to his credit Sheen, a film that reflects on the recurrent bloodbath in Kashmir. He now wants to direct a comedy for Anupam Kher that has been titled Hindu -- An Outsider. "My films are an integral part of my being a social activist," he says.
Ashoke Pandit can be contacted on 022-26328304/ 9820154279
-- Huned Contractor
(Huned Contractor is a freelance journalist and filmmaker based in Pune)
InfoChange News & Features, July 2006