Fire Still Burns
iView Author: Manu Warrier (Mumbai, India)
Email: warrierm [at] gmail [dot] com
Fire Still Burns
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless. ~Honoré de Balzac
Every waking hour and day of my vacation immediately after my board exams was spent listening to a collection of some Tamil songs that seemed to be the rage with all my cousins back in Kerala. Roja was a rage and I kept wondering how Santosh Sivan moved the camera so steady, so high over the beautiful palm trees of Kerala; how did Mani Ratnam bring out the turmoil of Roja? She does not care what the military does about the prisoner exchange, she just wants her husband back. Nasser’s character is at a loss for words. Cinema suddenly became very interesting in my life.
I started to look for meaning in every film I watched since then- in what the director was trying to say. I suddenly started sensing passion in some works while other works appeared plain, mundane and boring. I knew why the work of a Mani Ratnam, Santosh Sivan, Shekar Kapur, RGV and such were the differentiator, as was for that matter Rahman’s music. A common thread running between them was passion for what they did, for cinema, for life, for music, for expression and the urge to stand out from what was then the norm. Their works plainly said I can change things. It might not be a conscious decision, but probably when they did it with passion they knew they are doing it their best. They were reaching out to people like me who were getting frustrated. That was the beginning of the stirring in me, the urge to follow my passion.
Times changed since then, lots of family arguments, lots of sales jobs which I enjoyed, an MBA from the US later, I was still following their work. I could see the change they had bought about through their works today, more than 10 years later. A new wave of film makers have found hope, voice and reason; newer avenues have opened up and I jumped onto the fire. I wanted change, like most film makers. My infant journey over the past three years and working with some of the film makers who inspired me to change, has unknowingly made me socially driven. What caught me off guard when I returned to India, was the attitude of the majority of the new comers who were all sailing in a similar boat, mostly the mad rush to make quick fame and money with short cuts and half baked passion, with no conviction in what they have created. They are all willing to bend to demands without reason, out of desperation.
As I spoke to my wife I realized, it was a common thread running in all industries, there was little passion, indifference largely, jaane de attitude. There was a SYSTEM. Few spoke out on what’s happening everywhere, be it the film industry, medicine, hospitality, government. It seemed like an entire generation bereft of idols. They were pretty much conditioned to what’s happening. I was slowly falling into the vicious cycle of people who had already accepted the system and told me “aisa hi hota hai. Tu kya kar payega?
A horrifying thought crossed my mind, “This is not what I wanted. I probably made the wrong decision to stay back in India, and should now repack my bags and get ready to leave. I am f*****”. This was not the industry I had imagined. This was the system – a production line churning out mechanically, with no heart and soul and media that encourage the mediocrity the system churned out. Many in the industry purely lived for money and did not care what they were communicating to their audiences, even if it meant their hearts did not agree with their works, some were plain crap. Over the last three years I met many who were part of the system, and then there were many who wanted to rebel against the system. I started getting in touch with people who wanted to do different out of the box thinsg. It did not matter that I don’t have a theatrical release yet and I continue to make ends meet with installment cheques. I have an education and a supportive family who stand by my madness, and if I am not successful I’ll go back to the corporate world and work there with as much conviction – but that would be running away from problems. As the first step to seeing the change that I wanted, I informally got together with Vinayak Radhakrishnan and Prasad Ruparel to form Artistic Revelations.
As Artistic Revelations, we did a lot of work on screenplays and music, which never got funded, during the work breaks and chai breaks, we all used to complain about the system and how nothing changes. This is all shit. Several evenings with friends were spent on discussing how the system can be changed. The system was everywhere you looked, in the traffic, the film posters, and the people. We realized we were easily connecting with radicals. At some level we all had become radicals for change. Two more of them were Prakash Nambiar and Vinay Zende. We all used to meet whenever time permitted, through networking sites and SMS.
After the 26/11 attacks, I saw anger, candles and burning protest. I was happy the media was talking to a lot of aggressive teens, and they were speaking out. I remember Prakash telling me there is going to be a revolution. At a get together at Vinay’s house, we all had a heated argument on the point of a rally, if there was no participation by anyone in the system. How do they change? What’s the point we attended the rally, we are back to our beers, our lives have become really pathetic. No one cares, so why should we. That’s when the seed germinated. Fire Still Burns.
Our thought behind the concept was to communicate to the youth with an aggressive stance, with the same indifference they see outside and the same voice they reason with when they go to sleep. The idea of a song was born. It was our way of doing something through what we knew the best conceptualizing, writing, composing, and singing. Our idea was if each one did what they do the best with passion within the system, things would change. Example how Rahman changed the sound or how Mr. Varghese Kurien brought about Operation FLOOD. Sounds idealistic, but we believe in it.
We thought it would be a good idea to give them a song for free to channelise this energy we saw on 26/11. We might see change in the long run.
Once the decision was made to work on this project, we all decided to fund it out of our pockets and soon the team began growing with friends coming in and offering their expertise. They were all approaching their area of interest with the same passion. We had arguments, debates and some kattis with each other. We all kept coming back the next day with equal vigour, the others were exhausted from their regular day, but they loved coming back. We started having people working for us and after the composing was done by Prasad and Vinayak, our team got in touch with Aditi Singh Sharma after we heard her track in DEV D, who immediately came on board Also with luck, Dwarak Warrier, agreed to make time to work on the mix, after he heard us out. Vinay worked out the lyrics, which hit the nail on mark. After the song was ready, our team had multiple discussions and we arrived on a launch date
We decided to give everyone who voted a song on May 1st. We were excited. We launched a mini teaser campaign on youtube on 28th, to encourage people to make a difference. Maybe at some level start a movement
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pjm8TiIMC4
We decided to call it Fire Still Burns, we don’t stop with voting and the fire in us to see change should continue after the excercise. After the massive TATA Jaago Re campaign, we were expecting to see a huge turn out of teen voters. We were prepared for the D day.
The voter turn out was poor. A mere 42% in the city that most of us call home- Mumbai. Our song looked like a pointless exercise to communicate with an audience who did not care after all that candles and protests. We were angry and hurt. We decided to get in touch with all the people out there who do their best everyday to bring change within the system. We had tremendous support from our Facebook group.When we heard excuses on why people did not vote- long weekends, heat and no good candidates, it purely unleashed hell in us. We had put all our faith in this song to reach to everyone out there, and a mere low voter turnout won’t deter us from demanding change. We did our best and we reminded ourselves this is just the beginning if we wanted a movement, this is the first step and there are miles to go. What we hope to achieve with this song and through movements like PFC is a Renaissance by artists today to bring change in the coming years. We believe everyone is an artist in his profession.
To everyone here on PFC who believes in passion and if you think you did your best to contribute to change within the country, we give you Fire Still Burns.
The song is available for download the song at www.firestillburns.org.
“Fire Still Burns”
Music : Vinayak Radhakrishnan & Prasad Ruparel
Female Vocals : Aditi Singh Sharma
Rap Vocals : Vinayak Radhakrishnan
Lyrics : Vinay Zende
Chorus – Prasad Ruparel, Shalmilee Kholgade & Arjun Kanungo
Studio- Promethean
Recording Engineer : Franco Nicholson
Mixing & Mastering Engineer : Dwarak Warrier
Looking forward to all of your support to take this movement forward.
Tags: Project
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Keep the fire burning guys…wish to see and hear more from you…
Great going, do keep us posted on the road ahead.
Thanks Ram and Sethumadhaven for the encouragement. Also thanks to all the people who downloaded the song, after it was posted on PFC, we would love to hear back from you’ll. Thanks Amit and Shekar for emailing the long feedback on the song, I’ll pass it to my team:)
Fire Still Burns!