WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION
How I define Pune
How I define Pune
I always think of how pretty the city of Pune is, whenever I’m on my way out from there. It’s always been from behind an auto rickshaw seat, with luggage perched over my legs speeding towards an airport or a railway station, that I’ve reflected over my experiences and appreciated what’s moving past in front me and what’s being left behind.
There’s an old world charm about Pune. A place you’d probably go home to your grandparents and have wonderful childhood memories of playing under a tree. Of course the landscape has changed now, but the feeling is still there. The fact that it is a student city – makes it more of a Gurukul-like place. A place where you go as a student and then leave it as an adult.
And after spending a month at FTII this year, I wonder what it would be like if this institution that’s taught and inspired so many weren’t situated in Pune. The first talkie that came out of Prabhat studios, where FTII stands today was ‘Sant Tukaram’. Ironically the dhobi in FTII is called Tukaram and is probably as old as the studios themselves. And I feel that the spirit of that great Bhakti saint carries on year after year in this grand old campus… where great filmmakers and artists have applied their mind, body and soul (and lost it all) to the ultimate art of cinema.
Maybe it’s my fascination with anything that has a history. Maybe it’s my admiration for the free and the liberated. Its what defines the city of Pune for me – from the creative nuts at FTII to its IT types, from its foreign student population of the middle-east nations to the hippies of the Osho ashram.
It’s a state of mind.
There’s an old world charm about Pune. A place you’d probably go home to your grandparents and have wonderful childhood memories of playing under a tree. Of course the landscape has changed now, but the feeling is still there. The fact that it is a student city – makes it more of a Gurukul-like place. A place where you go as a student and then leave it as an adult.
And after spending a month at FTII this year, I wonder what it would be like if this institution that’s taught and inspired so many weren’t situated in Pune. The first talkie that came out of Prabhat studios, where FTII stands today was ‘Sant Tukaram’. Ironically the dhobi in FTII is called Tukaram and is probably as old as the studios themselves. And I feel that the spirit of that great Bhakti saint carries on year after year in this grand old campus… where great filmmakers and artists have applied their mind, body and soul (and lost it all) to the ultimate art of cinema.
Maybe it’s my fascination with anything that has a history. Maybe it’s my admiration for the free and the liberated. Its what defines the city of Pune for me – from the creative nuts at FTII to its IT types, from its foreign student population of the middle-east nations to the hippies of the Osho ashram.
It’s a state of mind.
They all come here to learn and be free.
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