Of 13 hues and the Majma

13/09/2007
It was the 6th open space pioneer internship programme .The session was our 2nd session on Gender fecilitated by Rakesh. The session commenced a bit late with our “blog-naming ceremony " wherein all of us had to come up with different names for our blogspot . Here came in the drama of the day when there was a heated argument on Abdul Kalam and nuclear weapon testing or energy (not yet clear). After a round of eliminations and from whatever limited choice google gave us, we finally zeroed down at “13 hues”. (not bad considering the fact that there were suggestions like "diaries of horror" “spicy 13” and “salad bowl”.) So our blogspot is now called “13 hues”.
We then had a screening of a documentary called “Majma” by Rahul Roy. Majma , essentially is the story of Aslam who sells medicines for sexual problems on the pavement of Meena Bazaar in Delhi and of Khalifa Barkat, a veteran wrestler who presides over an akhara (traditional training gym) in the adjacent park and puts a group of young men through the moral and physical grind of wrestling. This movie basically seeks to explore the instability and insecurity of working class lives in Old Delhi and how attitudes towards masculinity and male sexuality affect them. The screening was followed by an interactive session where we dicussed a little bit about the documentary. Some of us were shocked whilewhile some felt it was too "in- your- face".Then came up the topic of perspectives.
Dawar told us about this photograph in which the photographer captured a man set aflame
this snap won a prestigious photography competition. Some of us thought it was ridiculous and ‘wrong’ on the part of photographer while Rakesh explained it was not. Basically he told us how we could look at it from different perspectives both positive and negative . and then Renu took over the session for the last 15 minutes wherein we again talked about gender .