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iView Author: Gajendra S Shotriya (Jaipur, India)

Email : gshrotriya [at] yahoo.

Every child is special

This month Amir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par would be released. The tag line goes “Every child is special”. This brings me back to the PFC with this post. Every child off course is special, whether he is dyslexic or not and needs affection and love from his parents. More so if he is the only kid of working parents, further more if they live in a metro.

We are one of the single child parents. Two of my other partners who also wanted to have a single child family had to give in to their peer and family pressures and had another kid. An ideal family plan to Indians as per their changed stance now. They somehow always felt I too must have another kid and kept persuading me like every cigarette quitter persuaded other smokers to go to Bengali Baba in NS. I sometimes think why people do this. Like every married person would want everybody must marry or when I wanted tobacco to be banned after I quit chewing it and would advise everybody about its ill effects. I think it’s the feeling that why some one else should enjoy if I am not being able to do it. May be its making others fall prey to what you have undergone. “Chalo ek aur fansaa” feeling gives satisfaction to you well depicted by getting the lost finger back in NS. Anyways, I’ll stop here because no discussion seems complete on PFC without NS being dragged into. I’ll let NS rest in peace here and move on to my post.

In India, when one decides to be a single child parent, of course this is a responsible decision, responsibility towards your nation where population is a big problem already and the responsibility to bring up your child in the best possible way. But the responsibility just begins with this decision.

In circumstances as described above, the child may feel lonely at times, especially during vacations when he is alone after his or her parents have left for their work. First time I came across this situation was when my son didn’t look happy on his last day of exams, for the ensuing summer vacations. He rather felt bad that he will miss his school and friends. He asked me to take him to some swimming classes. I did that but thought how he would have felt if I hadn’t. The idea struck me that it called for a film and needed to be tested, explored and developed. To test it, I discussed the subject with few of my friends and they were quite inquisitive on the matter. I knew the idea had some substance though I felt the target audience to be able to relate with the issue wouldn’t be very big but nevertheless, it had few good things for every parent or for youngsters who would become parents in the near future.

I developed this idea into a story with the help of my son. Asking him how he feels when he is alone and what he does when we are not at home, what he would like to do in his vacations and so on. I was surprised to discover that at least five or six types of different birds could be found in my garden and there was even a pair of squirrels that ran whole day from one tree to the other. My script kept on building with his ideas but still it looked quite narrative and monotonous. So some juice was to be added. Some twist and drama was to be introduced to make it enticing.

A call from my brother that he was visiting us with his son gave me the twist I was looking for. I replaced his son with the daughter in my story to make it more emotional. To take my story forward, I needed a reason to get this visit cancelled to upset the kid. Reservation agitation by Gujjars in Rajasthan gave me the reason and my story moved forward. Rest of the sequence was rather simple to take the story to conclusion with a realization by parents that how important their child was to them. Discussions with few of my friends who are also single child parents helped me validate few of my conceptions. Finally the sequence was ready to be converted into a complete screenplay.

So here comes a special premiere for PFC viewers;

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For production, my unit comprised a single crew member, myself. At times though, I had the luxury of getting help from my wife, son and my office boy. I had to be the cinematographer, the gaffer, the grip, the director, the production manager, the spot boy and of course the editor. Sometimes, even this crew size gets reduced by half when I have to act as well, as happened with the films submitted for PFCOne 2007. My perspective here is that for a bigger production next year, I need to know about every aspect of film making and all this would be a great help to me then, even though a bigger production unit would be at my disposal.

Coming to the length of the film, my idea was to keep it between 12 to 15 minutes. So it was. Approximately 13 minutes. But for PFC viewers, I had to make it feasible for uploading on You tube and had to further cut it down to 10 minutes. If some one can help me find some site where longer films could be uploaded, please let me know.

I am not very good with words so I always prefer expressing myself through a visual medium. However, I can assure PFC viewers of a short movie every time I make a post because I enjoy doing that. I only hope PFC viewers too would have the same fun watching them.

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