00:01 IST
Room with the Table Fan, Inderpuri
New Delhi, India

Day 5

I feel like a loser. I need to spend more time with Dadi. And all I do is go to work, meet friends, come back, watch films and sleep. I don't talk to Dadi. I'm such a loser. I need to get up on my feet and fucking start this shit. There will be no story unless she tells her stories. What the fuck am I doing!? I need to get footage. More and more footage. More interviews. More stories. I'm such a waste. Why the hell did I take this up anway? This is stupid. Need to do something about it.

Capture these moments in the story. Of frustration. Need this to be an honest journey. Fuck. It all looks so polished and pretty in my head. SUCH a fuktard.

00:23IST
The downstairs room with the table fan, Inderpuri
New Delhi, India


Today I slept, coughed, heaved, saw Sherlock, tried writing, heaved, coughed, slept. No wanking. Small yays. It is bronchitis time of the year.

Day 4
I have been trying to come up with some sort of a coherent sequence of events to make sense of Dadi's project. It has to be an honest journey. It has to have the perspective of her grandaughters. Explicitly. There will be a slide explaining the explorers' jobs. Clarity on the POV achieved. Gives me a lot of freedom. Means I explore her life the way I see it. It will be a straightforward, linear story. From her birth till the present. I'm keen to explore the origin of things. Of life. The evolution of man and more importantly, his thoughts - the idea of community, geographies, boundaries - and neatly tie it all up with the journey of a lady's life. Born in 1928, till today. Today represents the day the project completes. Her childhood in Ferozepur. Her working life in Delhi (Rohtak Road). Her married life in Krishan Nagar. Her kids. The aftermath of Dada's death. Her kids' marriage. Life in Inderpuri. Retirement.

Now, the film needs to capture HER. What she liked, disliked, her insights, her habits - So far I have got her speaking a bit about her travels and a lot about her illnesses. She gives random, little stories from her past. Its as if there is a massive vessel of memory-strands swirling in her head. One strand gets picked, and she speaks of it. Sometimes, someone's conversation triggers the memory. Sometimes, it is all random. There are these fragments of stories inside her. Of her own actions, of the things people have said to her, visuals of places and events mixed with her own clinical emotions. She's beautiful. How the hell does one capture all that in a film!?

Memory. Her stories are an accumulation of her memories. Similarly, all those things that her brothers and sisters and the staff say about her will be an accumulation of her memories as well. Memory. We play with that. This is one of those click moments. Clickety-click-click.

This is a story of an old lady, who talks about her self by picking on her memories.