My Time as a Human

I was hired as one of two cinematographers to travel into the Punjab region of India to shoot a documentary about the epidemic of farmer suicides. The problem is not confined to Punjab, but this region has been known as the breadbasket of India and the Indian government stands to lose the most by letting the nation know the extent of the problem there. Work done over a subset of this region over the last 20 years or so estimates 150,000 suicides. The government currently acknowledges 7.

The Scale

When we started out we would enter a small village and go to the house of a fatherless family to interview them. We would then walk across the street to the next house, and perhaps two houses down to the next. Often there were 50-60 suicides in a village, even within the same household.

The suicides themselves are the result of intense economic pressures due to a variety of governmental policies, unchecked industrialization and the so-called green revolution.

Stadiums and Water Rights

While I was there I heard it said that India may be one of the largest democracies in the world, but it is also the most corrupt. Votes are easily bought and sold. I heard firsthand from a man who was offered a literal chest full of cash to push a campaign. I met another who kept the Mercedes he was given as a souvenir. Keep in mind that in this country, while they are becoming much more common, a high end Mercedes is still like having a rocket ship in your back yard.

During my morning walks in the countryside I would occasionally wander over to a huge pink stadium that had been dropped like a giant child’s forgotten toy in the center of the otherwise green and level fields that surrounded us. I thought at first that it was a Kubaddi or Cricket field. There were high bleachers on two sides, modern showers, locker rooms, and weight rooms that were all locked. Our host explained that the complex had been built by a campaigning politician seeking local votes. It was pitched as a place for children to play. In order to maximize the voter impact, it was placed in between several villages. This made it just far enough away from all of them that it was, quite literally, never used.

Given this kind of concern for the people that elected them, it is not surprising that government leaders sold off Punjab’s water to the desert areas of neighboring Rajistan. We saw massive canals sucking water away en-masse. In the years that followed, Punjab became drier and drier. Apparently the clouds of dust we experienced there were, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon. Farmers can no longer count on the once plentiful existing water to grow crops, and have been forced to dig wells, buy pumps, and then buy fuel for those pumps, thus increasing their costs.

The Green Revolution

In an attempt to feed its ever exploding population, in the mid 70s India implemented the Green Revolution. They began using genetically modified seeds which produced much higher yields, but in turn required significantly more water. These new crops also required pesticides and chemical fertilizers that, while greatly increasing cancer rates, also greatly increased farmer cost.

Unchecked Industrialization

We visited a large river so thick with pollution that it was dark and stank so badly we had difficulty being near it. Periodically this particular river overflows its banks and kills off all of the crops in the surrounding area. There are no rights, insurance, or protection of any kind. The farmer is simply SOL.

Price Controls

Using India’s large population of poor as justification, the Indian government has fixed prices for wheat and other crops. With these artificially lowered returns and an ever-increasing input cost, the Indian farmers are effectively being forced to subsidize India’s poor population and are thus steadily being impoverished themselves.

Loan Sharks

Enter the money lenders or, more accurately, loan sharks. These gentlemen offer the farmers the loans they need to survive when a crop fails, a family member gets sick, or they need to buy more fertilizer or seeds. They regularly charge between 40% and 60% interest. When the farmers cannot make payments these men often become aggressive, illegally taking land and property, often stripping the farmers of their means of ever paying off the loans. Most of these village farmers are not educated enough to know their rights or understand the nature of the interest they are paying. The loan sharks threaten and harass them. They verbally and (I believe) physically abuse the women of the family.

Ultimately some combination of the harassment and loss of hope and dignity cause these men to give up and either drink pesticide, jump in front of trains or burn themselves alive. Their families are left behind with the debts and without a primary breadwinner. It is not uncommon for the older male children who must then take on these burdens to themselves commit suicide.

When I asked whether the men worried about the children that they left behind, I was told that the common response was, “god will take care of them”.

I heard it said several times that India exists simultaneously in all times. One of the things that most excited me was how close people still were to the means of production. As we pulled into the small town of Lehra I insisted that we stop as I spotted a man crouched over a tiny pile of bricks. His left hand turned a small hand-cranked blower that fed into a crude brick forge about the size of a paint bucket. He drew out a glowing red chunk of metal and proceeded to hammer out… a pair of scissors. From scratch. It was absolutely amazing and yet, exactly how all of our tools were once made.

In America we have forgotten to honor our craftsmen. We look down on people who do things like paint, hang drywall, garden, and repair cars. Having seen a pro hang drywall, there is nothing like it. They can eyeball a spot, slice a board and hang it in seconds. The tailor in India took a few of my measurements and, without a pattern, to my custom specifications, sewed up a pile of shirts with a hand cranked sewing machine and a giant pair of brass handled scissors. It took him all of a day. I believe this kind of skill deserves respect, and he was certainly proud of what he could do. I would love to see more of that here.

One village family decided to make me a blanket from scratch while I was there. I learned how to do everything from pulling cotton out of its shell, to spinning thread, to dying and, finally, weaving. I saw some beautiful work that they had done and asked them if they ever sold these things to raise money. They were confused, and couldn’t understand why anyone would pay for something that they could make themselves. Everyone knew how to make their own mungies, blankets, clothes and food.

For similar reasons no one ever went out to eat. In the whole region we found only two places that could be called restaurants. One was essentially a bar that served food to its all-male all-drunken clientele. It was only when we became regulars that they cleaned up, put out napkins, and really went all out with the food. The second was a little vegetarian place that actually managed to be somewhat of a family establishment. Surprisingly we saw women and children there. They also managed some seriously tasty food including south Indian dishes like huge, wonderfully spicy masala dosas. Rounded off with a bit of kulfi ice cream, this became one of my favorite meals outside the havella where we stayed.

It is absolutely shocking how much paint is wasted in India. Most of it is used to write “stop” across lanes, signify lane dividers, mark sides of the road or point out directions of traffic flow. Ridiculous. Everyone knows that if you’re in a hurry, which is always, the fastest way to get around the mass of cars ahead is to whip into opposing traffic and floor it. Really, any crack or hole between cars that you can find is a tunnel to your destination. If you hold down your horn continuously as you do it, the trucks will know you’re there and give you a few bonus seconds to scrape between them.

Here in America if the space between cars is wasteful, the space inside is worse. I’ve seen a Volkswagen microbus head out with a mere 6-7 people inside. In India I’ve seen that many hanging from the back of the same Volkswagen doing 65 mph on the highway!

And the circling! When you miss a turn in India, you just back that sucker up. Even if it’s a full sized bus full of people. Especially if it’s a full sized bus. They’re harder to turn. You’ll do fine as long as you keep a hammer foot on the brake and have someone hanging out the side shouting, “chal chal chal chal!” (Go go go go!)

Oh sure, we lost a rearview mirror off of the side of the bus, but you can always rip one off of the other side and bolt it on. We scraped off the side of another truck once too but since there’s no insurance, you just shout and wave your fist at the other driver and move on.

My favorite two-part sign on the side of a public bus literally overflowing with people, whose arms and heads protruded from every window orifice, was “Dear God”… “Save Us”.

One of the things I really liked about this project was that the approach was very much in line with my own evolving views on how to produce effective documentaries. Instead of bombarding the viewer with shocking statistics and images, the idea was to take them on a journey. We chose six families (fourteen children) who had been left behind by fathers or mothers who had committed suicide. We captured their stories, got a sense of where they were, and then taught them to be activists and took them to Delhi. We rounded out their journey by traveling to Amritsar to see the Golden Temple and there reflect on their experiences.

The Selection Process

Choosing which families and which children would end up part of the project was physically and emotionally taxing. The children were so appealing and their stories so intriguing, and yet each initial interview was over with so quickly. Worse yet, each was immediately followed by a hasty exodus to the little truck and another long, rough ride hunched over my gear in the back. I felt terrible about the people we left, tears in their eyes, vanishing behind us in the dust as we ran from village to village. Gina, our anthropologist, was particularly effected by this procedure and I tried to assure her that once we made our choices we would be able to invest real time.

Dharvinder

It was in one of these early interviews that I met Dharvinder. His father had committed suicide by drinking pesticide a mere month and a half before we walked through his door, cameras in hand. He was the oldest child, somewhere around fourteen to sixteen years old. Most of the people we met had no idea how old they were and birthdays were general markers like, “the mangos were ripe” or, “we were harvesting wheat”. He was quiet and polite during the interview but as we asked questions about his father he began struggling to maintain his composure. Something about the way he stood, trying so hard to be strong, and yet still very clearly a kid, really got to me. I could feel the weight of his new responsibility as he stood beside his mother, grandmother, and adopted sister. At last, against his will, tears made their way out into the open and, after turning away several times, he ran behind a wall to collect himself before returning to try to finish the interview. That image of him stays with me even now: his blue knit hat tight around his head and turned at a slight angle, his back straight, standing firm against the world with only his moist eyes to betray him.

Sher and Salma

In another house we met two children who’s mother had left them after their father had, I believe, hung himself. In this case the mother had not wanted to leave her children. She remarried and, as is the tradition there, went to live with her new family. The family did not want anything to do with her existing children and refused to allow her to see them. She called them on the sly for a while, even making a few trips to see them, but was discovered and stopped in some way that was unclear. This left Sher and Salma alone with their grandmother.

As it turns out, this was one hell of a grandmother. Beeji (grandma) as we called her, was feisty, upbeat and set a tone for these kids that beamed through their smiles and kept their heads high. Like so many of the others we met, they went hungry any number of times and had little more than their tiny two room brick and mud house, but they maintained excellent grades in school, worked hard, and Sher was one of the best English speakers in the group. (I say this because the focus of education there seems to be reading, writing, math, and English.)

This old woman walked a huge distance to the kids’ school every week to speak with their principal and spent her days spinning thread from cotton by hand. She was happy to try to teach me, despite my clumsy fingers, and only laughed at me when she couldn’t help it. I have rarely in my life met someone so truely and vibrantly alive. She said it was because she drank milk.

I want to talk about all of the families, my experiences meeting them and all of our interactions, but it dawns on me that at some point I’d be writing the documentary out shot by shot here in my blog. Suffice it to say that we heard a lot of difficult stories and met some amazing people in the search process alone.