INTRO

COSTA RICA

ALASKA

INDIA

HDTV Diary

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PHOTOS BY BILL ZARCHY, EXCEPT AS NOTED

Victoria Terminus, Mumbai (Bombay), oldest railroad station in India

Thursday 1 June 2000 Two days after returning from Alaska, Larry calls to say that the Indian consulate has not yet issued our journalist visas, although he was told the approval has been sent from Delhi and rests on the desk of a consular official in San Francisco. But no visa, no ticket purchase, cautions Larry. Accordingly, our departure for India is postponed until next Tuesday, June 6th. We speak daily by phone and he forwards earnest and amusing emails from Sushil, our Bombay-based production manager. Friday 2 June 2000 Visas have been issued! Our departure is confirmed for Tuesday! Tuesday 6 June - Wednesday 7 June 2000 I head back to SFO to meet up with Larry and Randy. Jon flies in from Austin, and we check into Business Class on Lufthansa, headed for Frankfurt for a change of planes, then on to Bombay. After a ten-hour ordeal of sitting we are in Germany. As we check in for our second leg, I am told by the gate agent (darn them!) that my carry-ons -- the HD camera and my black "rollaboard" -- are too large for the available space on the plane, despite the fact that they conform with FAA size regs in the US. Also, we are on Business Class on a 747, so why should it be cramped? We reach an accommodation: the camera can go with me, and I remove a small backpack with (I think) everything I want with me for the flight and let them check the rollaboard (now renamed a "stowbelow"). Moments after it goes down the belt, I realize that the novel I wanted on the flight is inside. So I can't read E. M. Forster's "A Passage to India" during my passage to India. After a brisk walk around the terminal (no bookstore to replace the book) I cool down. When we board, I realize the aircraft is an old model 747-200 and overhead space is severely limited. Eight hours later we are in Bombay, or Mumbai, as it is now known. I make a mental note to ask about the name change. We are held up in Customs for a short time. Larry, as usual, is lead dog in these situations, and the three of us back off to watch the master at work. Apparently, despite the fact that Larry has a Carnet for International Shipment for the gear, as well as an official Invitation to come film in India from the Government, the official insists we are lacking a form from the Ministry of Finance, which we need to bring in all our gear. After some hemming and some hawing and some consultation with higher-ups, he waves us through with a smile, and without inspection. Outside Customs we find Sushil Bhatnagar of India Vision International, our local Production Manager, and his staff. Over the past few weeks, Larry has passed along to me a series of classic, interesting, humorous, articulate, and unique emails from Sushil about the progress of our arrangements. This began with a long one about Bangladesh, featuring a 21-day schedule for getting personnel and gear in and out for a three-day shoot. At last we get to meet! Outside, it's over 80 degrees (at midnight), very humid, and drizzling. It is, after all, the beginning of monsoon season. Instantly my glasses fog up. Our gear gets loaded in a van and we are off for a long drive to the Taj Mahal Hotel. Very classy, a far cry from the Country Club in San Marcos. But by now it is 3:30 am Thursday and we are too tired to appreciate it. We plan to take the camera with us the next day, but it won't be a "Scoot." In India, as in Britain, they call a scout a "Reccie," short for reconnaissance, I guess, so we decide to call our Reccie/Shoot a "Recoot." Kinda lame, maybe, but it's tired and we're late. Quick shower and off to bed. Thursday 8 June 2000 We are picked up in the pouring rain by Sushil's people a bit after noon and driven a long way to a hotel back near the airport. Movie billboards abound. We are now in Bollywood, the film capital of India, the most prolific moviemaking country in the world (over 800 feature films every year!) and near to Sushil's office. We have a long lunch with him and his partners -- Manju Asrani (a producer-director in her own right) who will be our Assistant Production Manager, and her husband, known simply as Asrani, a well-known Indian actor-director. We sit on a covered veranda overlooking the rain and the stormy Arabian Sea. The Indian food is excellent and we all get acquainted. Sushil explains that Mumbai is the new-old name of the city. He says the name has been changed for political reasons, that it is somewhat of an inconvenience, and that internationally, the city is still known as Bombay. Later we drive to our lighting rental company, where we meet with the owner. We exchange pleasantries and are offered tea and coffee. Though full from our marathon lunch, we accept, rather than appear impolite. We also meet with Heera Saroj, who will be our gaffer in Pune, to go over our lighting order. Though we are not renting a huge package (2-1200 watt HMIs, 2-575 watt HMIs, 2-1K babies, an openfaced 2K, and one fluorescent fixture), it is still very rewarding to review what we are taking. It's a scene I've played out a number of times over the years in Taiwan, Thailand, and other countries. As a crowd of 20 curious workers from the company gather around, each light is pulled off the shelf, turned on, spotted and flooded and admired. Jon is amused by the scene and takes some pictures of the crowd watching me approve each of the lights. With a start I realize that nearly all the workers are barefoot, there's water on the floor (the rain has not stopped since our arrival), and these guys are handling electrical fixtures with wet feet! This is a big no-no, safety-wise, but the demo proceeds without incident. Often movie lights and their accessories go by different names in different places, and it's important to straighten that out. Or they don't have exactly what I've requested, and it's helpful to see what they wish to substitute. At home we would rent a grip truck filled with many lighting toys, often belonging to an owner-operator. When abroad, there's no telling what to expect. In some cases the truck is rented completely empty and we have to specify every stand, every cable, every clip or gel or adapter. The other important thing to check out is the grip equipment, the gear they will use for rigging, for cutting and coloring and controlling light, for casting shadows. Often the production manager is very savvy about the gear and can advise us. Sometimes questions can be resolved with a phone call or two to the gaffer or lighting company. But in a strange country there is nothing quite so useful and educational as a trip to the rental company. Heera seems to have a good handle on the lights and good presence with the rental guys, and we come away with a good impression. When I return to the lighting company office, Randy is entertaining Manju with stories and with a demonstration of the Fart Machine. She loves it and the kind of humor it represents, and her laugh is contagious. We stop at what appears to be a small stationery store, a shop like many others in the market area. But because we are in Bollywood, they sell colored gels and white diffusion materials for lighting, camera tape, and even clapboard slates! We are offered tea and coffee again, but try to refuse politely, rather than float any further down the caffeine river. Eventually, we finish and get back to the Taj for a quick dinner and bed. We've schlepped the camera around all day, but the unrelenting monsoon has kept us from rolling even an instant of tape.

The Gateway to India in Mumbai
The scene while we're checking over the lighting gear PHOTO BY JON MCDONALD
Meeting Heera at the lighting company PHOTO BY LARRY LAUTER

Friday 9 June 2000 Today is the day we expect to suffer from the impact of the Larry Lauter Law. This rigid dictum states that the worst day for jet lag is the second day after arrival, rather than the first. The logic: on the first day, one is excited by being in a new place and adrenaline enables you to power through. On the second day, it hits you. Hard experience has proven it often to be true. On this trip I took "No-Jet-Lag" pills, a homeopathic remedy, and I'm curious to see if they help. Bombay is almost exactly halfway around the world from San Francisco and 12-1/2 hours later (I think it's the only country whose time zone differs by a half hour from the rest of the world's). So jet lag could be huge. Nevertheless, I wake up after 5-6 hours sleep feeling pretty good. Randy meets me in the Coffee Shop and tells me that, since the rain has stopped, Jon has set up the camera looking out the window of his hotel room. We have gotten many interesting shots from hotel windows in various countries, sometimes sunsets or sunrises, sometimes just interesting vistas. I run up to Jon's and we shoot several minutes of harbor, rooftops, birds, sky, and city details. Our first footage in India! We break down and prepare to travel. We check out of the Taj Mahal with regret. It is a wonderful hotel and high on my list of the great ones. Elegant decor, great service, reasonable prices for food. We load into a huge tour bus Sushil has rented for our trip to Pune. He says it is 150 kilometers away and will take 4-6 hours to get there. That's only a hundred miles, I think, why would it take so long? There's still no rain, so we set up the camera at the front of the aisle of the bus. We are concerned about bouncy or jiggly movement, since our film will be projected on such a large panoramic screen, but the bus proves to be a stable platform for shooting. We get shots of some street action, traffic, a few faces, billboards and sacred cows in the street. We see shantytowns and unspeakable poverty, people living in mudholes and cardboard houses, and, at one point, we are told we're passing the largest slum in Asia. I'd seen massive shanties and slums in Manila and other places, but this was vast. After we leave town, the weather clears and we start to climb into the mountains and soon discover why Sushil's time estimate is so long. The road is under construction for many miles, eventually to be replaced by an expressway. Our driver skillfully plays "Indian chicken," leaning on his horn, passing at every opportunity, even on blind curves. But every driver is doing it and they seem to take care of each other, signal each other about oncoming traffic, and survive with a minimum of road rage. In the construction zone, we see over a dozen overturned trucks, grim reminders that chicken is a game you don't want to lose. Some of the trucks have been there a long time. Jon is sitting directly behind the driver, i.e., very close to the passing traffic, and several times he turns white as he observes some near misses. We try to imagine the horror of this journey in a storm. (After my return to California, our friend Roshani, who grew up in Bombay, tells me that her mother was once in a terrible head-on collision on the Bombay-Pune road. Their driver was killed and her mother's sisters severely injured, and, in one case, crippled.) Eventually we reach Pune in one piece and applaud our driver for his efforts. We check into the Blue Diamond Hotel, which was newly taken over by the same management group as the Taj Mahal. They are busy renovating, but obviously they have a long way to go. We have lunch in the coffee shop beneath a mural of the Palace at Versailles, to the strains of "I want to be in America" from West Side Story. After lunch we go to meet Amit Pradhan and his father and brother at their high-tech startup firm. They have set up interviews and shooting opportunities in town for us, and we are very grateful for their advance work. We go to see the Pyramids, the health club where they belong, and find several locations for filming. We are now being chauffered in a small car, and this driver is even more aggressive and horn-intensive than our bus driver. Randy sits in the front seat, very close to the imagined head-ons, and deliberately forces himself to look away several times. We go to Jon's room to review our footage from the drive to Pune. It looks good and very stable, but the Larry Lauter Law has hit in full force by now and we're all dozing off. We mumble goodnights and stumble off to bed.

Interviewing Dr. Gupta at the Technology Park
Jon sets up the boom for interviews in Pune
Larry & Sushil ponder our next move
The ever-present corps of curious "volunteers" watch us carefully as Mangal sits in foreground

Saturday 10 June 2000 Today we have the same driver as yesterday, but in a large van (called a "Tempo Traveller") for the camera and the American crew. Sushil and Manju are in another car with Om and Mangal, their production assistants. We are also bringing a small lighting truck and a large generator van with the words "generator van" on front and back, presumably so noone will confuse it with a bus and try to flag it down on at street corners. The vehicles are late arriving at the hotel. After we leave, we notice that our van is smelling funny. Something seems to be burning, but the driver denies anything is wrong, even when questioned by Heera. Theories abound about the source of the problem: clutch worn down and slipping or lacking fluid, brakes grabbing, etc. After a while we glide slowly to a stop and the drivers consult each other and monkey with some tools while we do a shot at the side of the road. Soon we are under way again. The problem recurs intermittently during the day, but somehow we always get where we are going and never burst into flames. The van is pretty beat up and has the disconcerting habit of playing "Jingle Bells" when it backs up! So we are sweltering through a humid Indian spring and listening to "Dashing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh..." We ask to have the van changed. We arrive in a light rain at a Software Technology Park still under construction and start our first setup outside with gaffer Heera, key grip Uday, and a crew of at least a half dozen others, most of whom I recognize from the lighting company ritual on Thursday. The setup goes well, but their work style is different from what we're used to. Like a shoot Larry, Randy and I did in Thailand a few years ago, the lighting vendor seems to decide how many people to send, depending on the size of the order. I never do figure out how many guys we've got on the crew or learn everyone's name! We interview Mr. Gupta, an official of the Technology Park, who discusses the fact that there are over 5000 technology startup companies in India and what facilities are available to assist them. Behind him we see new completed buildings and adjacent land slated for development. We climb a nearby hill for some vistas from the Hindu temple at the top. From here we can see the old India and the new development, a great 360 degree vista. We grab some great shots and portraits of kids coming up the hill, construction workers down below, an oxcart passing by. Everywhere we go, curious people on the street stop whatever they are doing and stare at us, some for more than an hour and from very close to us. They feel like "volunteers" on our crew sometimes. We don't feel threatened, but we are very aware that we are surrounded by people -- and many of them -- with a different concept of personal space than our Western psyches are used to. We climb down, move into one of the office buildings, and roll an interior shot of people working in cubicles, then portraits of workers from some of the technology startups Mr. Gupta mentioned. As we drive back to town, we discuss with Heera the film industry in Bombay. Though on this job he is our gaffer, normally he works as a Director of Photography, (or DOP, as they say here in India, following the British style) and he shoots 2-3 feature films a year! Later that afternoon, we arrive at the office of Dr. Bhatkar for an interview. We were unable to scout here, but we'd been hoping to shoot outside. Unfortunately, that proves impossible, so we set up in the office and light it in a "high tech" way. At first we think we have a lemon of a scene, but with some fun painting with light, we end up making lemonade. I raise the camera high to take advantage of the depth in the office, but that means I have to raise Randy and Dr. Bhatkar also. Finding boxes and cases which are the right heights is a challenge. Oh what I would give for a set of apple boxes -- fulls, halves, quarters, and pancakes. Nevertheless, we give it a great look and shoot his passionate discussion of the future of tech. "I.T. doesn't just stand for Information Technology," he says. "It also means India Tomorrow." and "I don't think of India as a billion mouths to feed, but as a billion minds to unleash." Heera starts teaching me some words in Hindi. I bid the crew "soobratree" (goodnight) and "danyawad" (thank you) and they hoot with delight, or perhaps with amusement over my accent. It just reminds me again that people everywhere appreciate any attempt to communicate with them in their own language. Our Indian colleagues here are warm and hospitable and eager to make friends. Heera teaches Jon the words to a popular song which translate loosely as "What is behind your bra (bodice)?" The correct answer in straightlaced India, apparently, is "My heart."

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Sunday 11 June 2000 Same van again today, but we are told it was fixed overnight. "Jingle all the way." On our way to location this morning, we come upon a herd of cows, bulls, and water buffaloes passing down the road. With much shouting and honking of horns, we manage to overtake and pass the herd, advancing well in front of them. This gives us time to set up the camera on the side of the road and shoot several minutes of the animals and their herders. Cattle are considered sacred in Hinduism and never slaughtered or eaten. They run freely through the streets, even in big citiies like Mumbai. I suddenly realize where our phrases "holy cow" and "sacred cow" come from. We arrive at the Pyramids and set up to interview Amit, his father and brother. They discuss their software startup venture, but also important stuff about the Brain Gain India is currently experiencing, where young people go abroad for education and then return to India to get involved in the burgeoning technology industry there. This is as opposed to the Brain Drain which prevailed for so many years, a major sea change for the future of India. Randy uses the Fart Machine to elicit some smiles while we shoot their portrait. While at the club, we roll some flavor shots of lotus leaves and flowers, frogs, palm fronds waving in the breeze, frangipani blossoms, river shots with cows and buffalo, landscapes with grad filters. In the afternoon, we interview Prattik, an 11-year-old boy who has just passed a technician's test to become a Microsoft Certified Professional, the youngest in India. He was not part of our original plan, but Sushil saw an article about him in the paper this morning, suggested we interview him, and called to set it up. We shoot him in his bedroom, discussing his love of computers and playing the tabla, traditional Indian drums. His dad is in the computer business and Prattik got an early start. His parents are very hospitable to our gang of Americans and Indians invading their home, even delighted to have us there. We are likewise delighted to be received in an Indian home and act appropriately respectful. They delight in the Fart Machine, as Randy uses it to coax a smile from Prattik. Strike another blow for International Understanding. We drive up the only hill for a view of Pune, but it's a bit disappointing. There's a Hindu temple there, but we are unable to get to the side of the hill that faces the main part of the city. We decide to head downtown to get shots of congestion on the streets. We want to see people on foot, cars, trucks, three-wheeled taxis, buses, scooters, bicycles. Downtown is very crowded, because school starts tomorrow (summer vacation here is April to June) and families are doing some last minute shopping. We're dying to get out of the van and do some shooting, but there's nowhere to pull over. Heera suggests that we could rig the camera on the roofrack of the other van (a "Sumo" model from the Tata car company). It's a great idea, we pull over and Jon lashes the tripod to the roofrack. As the light fades (by now it's after 7 pm) we pull out into traffic, with Jon and me on top, Randy in the front seat shouting directions, and Larry walking alongside taking pictures. We're quite a sensation! We drive slowly through the traffic as the hordes watch us, some waving, some just staring in a manner we've learned is pretty typical of the people here. The shots are great, but is there still enough light? We start shooting with the gains boosted to plus 3 to increase the camera's speed, then at plus 6. At one point, I bang on the roof and tell the driver to stop, so that I can zoom in on crowds, then pull back to reveal more and more and more people. As I zoom out, I see a policeman running toward us, looking very angry. "Go, go," I yell, as I bang on the roof again. We go, but the traffic is crawling and the cop overtakes us easily. Is he concerned about the two gringos on the roof, their safety or their distraction of other drivers? No, he just yells at our driver not to stop anymore. We shoot about 8 minutes of tape, then decide to wrap and head back to the Blue Diamond. Over beer and snacks we review the past two days' shooting and the results are dynamite. The stuff from the roof of the Sumo is vibrant, colorful, and exciting. You can clearly see the policeman running towards the camera car! The color saturation is high and the frame is packed with surging crowds, traffic jockeying for position, and brightly-lit shops. And no noticeable grain, despite the gain boost. Happily we head for bed.

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first uploaded 18 June 2000