THE UNEXPECTED DIRECTOR

I am not here to tell anything special about myself through this blog. Just want to share one of my college memories. This is in fact the last memory and the last incident took place on the last night of my college life.

             I decided to make the last night a special and memorable one. Without any proper plan Raghu, Jack and I started from college to spend the full night in bessy beach, besant nagar and the near-by areas. I don’t have to describe the exquisite beauty of the sea, especially during the night. It was supposed to be third night after full moon. So the high tides and the moon’s reflection on the black sea made the sea look special. After spending around two hours sitting and chatting on the beach, we decided to have our dinner. “The last dinner” - like the last supper of Jesus Christ. You can guess how satisfied we would have been after enjoying the beach. With the thought that everything was going well, we started searching for a hotel.

Those of you who have been to besant nagar beach will know the length of the road. We searched for a hotel but in vain. Not even a road side vendor was available. Hunger made us curse the beach as it is the normal tendency of humans to praise something when we are happy and curse the same when we are sad. Finally, after walking for sometime we saw a hotel at the end of the road. We ordered whatever was available at that time. We had to wait for about 20 minutes and we were irritated to see people in next table enjoying their dinner.

“Dai ***** gandaa varudhu da” shrugged Raghu.

“Every person is jealous about others until his needs are satisfied” I said to myself. After a long wait, the food came. It was the worst food we had ever tasted.

“namma college mess sapaday parava illa da” announced a voice.

It was full of garlic paste and the heating had not been done properly.  I wish to give no more description of that.

            After finishing our dinner, we realized that no buses would be available at 1 am. Left with no other option, we started walking towards college. We hadn’t expected that our last college night would end in such a boring manner. To kill the time we started taking videos in our Digicam. And Raghu started telling ghost stories. He is a nostalgic person, who shows interest in talking about his past, in hearing about others’ past and future plans (especially what they would do on their first night). It is generally thrilling to hear ghost stories during the night time, and that too on an abandoned road. Then came my turn to tell a story. As I was narrating, an idea flashed. “Why can’t we shoot the story in our Digicam?  Why can’t we take a SHORT FILM based on this story?” I said.

But short film? None of us knew anything about it. How to do the Direction? Editing? Screenplay? BGM?

We told ourselves “Ok. This will be the last video and the last memory of our college life. We’ll take it whatever be the outcome.” This statement convinced all three of us.

Then came the question of what to shoot. “Ok what is the story?” asked Jack.

“Donno… let us shoot whatever comes to our mind. Later we’ll manage with what we have during the editing” I convinced.

“Ok where is the light?” questioned Raghu(A typical question all electrifiers will ask). His robotic skills might have made him to ask such a technical question. Actually it’s true. In film industry there is a separate department for lighting with many sub-divisions in it.

“We’ll have to use street lights. Let’s walk towards college. On the way there are several street lights. The time difference between one light and the other would give us time to think about what our next scene should be.” I said.

“Done. Dialogues?” another technical question by Raghu.

“It is easy to ask questions, than to answer” I said to myself.

It is very difficult to go to a place when you don’t know where you are going. It was a similar situation. Without a story or screenplay, we started to shoot our film.

            We had walked half the distance from beach to college and by that time, we had met five policemen, each one at a different place. Obviously they enquired, “Who are you? Where are you from? etc” But it was the time when we submitted our college ID cards for ‘no due certificate’ and we had nothing left in our hand.

We can’t blame them because three guys walking in the middle of night with a Digicam in hand would make anybody suspicious. Especially at one particular place, we had kept the Digicam on the road and all three of us were walking and that made a policeman suspect that we are planting some bomb on the road!

Half and hour later we reached college. We sat in front of vivek audi relaxing, thinking about what the story would be and how we would end it. We kept consoling ourselves with the same thought - “Later during editing we can manage with whatever is available to us.” We then shot some scenes around vivek audi and took photographs. Before reaching our room we had decided on the climax.

            Thus the film came into being. Please don’t leave comments like bad lighting, visual not clear, poor audio recording, “comedy ah iruku”, title is not subtle, story copied ( it would be the most humorous comment as we ourselves didn’t know what story would be till we had reached the room). We are aware that all these things and even more are missing. But this is just the last piece of memory in the four years of our cherishable college life.

P.S.  all (only) three of them are involved in cinematography. In two scenes we managed to bring all three into frame.