Anamika Haksar is a relentless and persistent mischief-maker.

She made a film - "Ghode ko

jalebi khilane le ja riya hun" that moves like a whirlwind, twirling from the real, to the
imagined, to the dreamt and the possessed - with the ease of a trapeze artist, and canny of
a magician. Transfixed in a spell, we are, all the while submerged in an intense audioscape
of rivers, machines, storms, trains, and the most terrifying of all - silence. As we keep
drowning, we witness series after series of images from the lives of people who build and
make our cities function, and live like shadows in its underbelly. These are people we have
only seen and never observed; heard and never listened to.

The camera, bewitched by Anamika, refuses to be where it should sensibly sit - and there
lies her mischief again. It is either so close that we can smell the labouring body - too close
for comfort; or so bent that we can feel the layers and layers of plastic wrapping around our
head suffocating us. The camera moves at reckless, alarming angles that constantly make us
feel as if we will chance upon something private, something we do not want to witness - like
how casually addicts court danger or what passes as food for people with no homes. But
then the screen bursts into something totally unexpected - like a magic carpet flying through
minarets like an Arabian fantasy.

Everything speaks in Anamika's film - havelis, animals, trees, plastic - even people who
remain invisible tell us their stories. That's another of her mischiefs - she strings stories like
streamers and hangs them across narrow lanes, to linger after the party has ended. Labour
speaks vociferously in her film – delivering sacks, pushing carts, frying kachoris, cleaning
homes, washing clothes, picking pockets, and rummaging through garbage. But what speaks
the loudest are desires. Throughout the film desires leap out of the abandoned corners of
real lives to desperately become what they must, in animation. Can dreams be separated
from nightmares one may ask. Sometimes these desires fulfill their potential and at other
times, waylaid, they return half heartedly back to reality. But what lingers as residues of
these desires are like the magic of the lamp of Aladin that Patru in the film wants to share
with all.

Shajahanabad in Old Dilli is Anamika's playmate - and they cruise through their game of
chhupa-chhupi, as teasingly she opens one story, deftly closing another. Her storytelling is
whimsical and stunning - at times taking your breath away. The scene where I choked up
was when a woman was hanging washed clothes on a line and she moved them apart like a
screen to unfurl the most beautiful image of a valley of flowers. There is another scene
where a man is standing in the middle of a river with a little hut made of earth in his hands
and it slowly disintegrates and slips away through his fingers. Images likes these are in
abundance throughout the film.

She plays with us too, this Anamika - that is her most devilish mischief of all. She makes us
the same tourists who search for 'subaltern stories' in the film, look for things to save and
prefer polar bears to people, and refuse to listen unless they like the stories being told. She
allows us no excuses; offers us no escapes - she leaves only one warning 'tamasha na ban
jana tamasha dekhnewalon.'

I was wondering what genre this film would fall under, what form should we call it. Then it
came to me that throughout the film I felt I was listening to folklore, albeit in a
contemporary format. So could we say this is folkcinema ? No matter what the form, in this
satire about governments, politics, ideologies, corporates and commerce, amidst utter
poverty and ecological disaster where everything seems lost - Anamika is mischievous
enough to show us a flicker of what we can possibly hope for - a world of kindness, a world
of camaraderie, a world fragile enough to justify holding it tightly to our hearts with both
arms. Anamika weaves poetry into that desire luring us to become seekers on that quest.
(Go watch this film in your city. In Bangalore it is running at Vega City Mall)

#GhodeKoJalebiKhilaneLeJaRiyaHoon