Meenakshi Shedde: Wisdom Tree 'katta'

Illustration/Uday Mohite

It's funny how relatively small incidents can shape your entire life. So, a thank you party is long overdue, for all those who've been incredibly mean to me. I was forced to look for other options because of them - and am infinitely happier for it.

If it wasn't for the wretches, I'd probably still be plodding in a full-time journalists' job, under a row of baleful tubelights in some hip high-rise in a textile mill area, my life squished between two beeps of an unforgiving swipe card. Instead of which, I watch films for a living: cinema pays my bills; it has given me opportunities to travel the world. It elevates my soul and allows me to empathise with people from diverse cultures, whom I've never met. Above all, it has brought me deep and abiding friendships.

I was remembering all this because last week, the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, invited me to lecture to the Film Appreciation (FA) students on 'Curating for Film Festivals'. I had done my diploma in Film Appreciation at FTII 25 years ago, so it felt like my life was coming a full circle. That one-month course transformed my life. Basically, I had had a big fight with my boss, and quit my job in a major newspaper. Soon after, I'd seen an ad for the FA course, applied and got admission.

You're cocooned in an island on the FTII campus. We didn't have mobile phones then, and as I recall it, you had to go to an STD booth to make a phone call to Bombay. With almost no communication with the outside world for a month, it was a much more immersive experience than a 4D film. My attention had waned after attending a slew of lectures, many highly academic googlies. But the film screenings, held in collaboration with the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), were a treasure of the best of world cinema and Indian cinema, and they invited Indian directors for a post-screening Q/A.

So I preferred to watch three films a day, and then hang out with the gang at the 'katta' under the "wisdom tree", a mythical mango tree on its main avenue. The addabaji about films - and life - over beer and stronger stuff, often with composer and sound expert Vikram Joglekar singing Hindustani classical ragas in the stillness of the wee hours, is unforgettable. Of all the movies we saw, Federico Fellini's La Strada and Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha left me devastated. I tottered to the 'Shantaram pond' in the FTII back woods, weeping inconsolably after Subarnarekha. Later, my friends came looking for me with torches, but I needed to nurse my grief alone.

The students were from all over India and South Asia - Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. My roommate in the Ladies' Hostel was Anila Gill, a stylish, half-French, half-Sikh young girl. Pune in May and June brings a bheja-frying summer. When the heat got too much, we would drag our mattresses to the terrace and sleep under the stars and the eavesdropping branches of a mango tree, heavy with fruit, with birds occasionally cheeping in their sleep. One night, there was a sudden thunderstorm, and we raced indoors, giggling, dragging our soaked mattresses behind us.

The FA course affected me deeply. Always a person of words, I was now totally seduced by the power of images, and knew my life had to revolve around film. I joined a television company, hoping to eventually work in film. But, it was so degrading, that when an elegant former boss invited me back to the newspaper, I returned to print journalism, but started to regularly review films as a critic, and that kick-started my film career and made me what I am today. So I raise two toasts: one to FTII's FA course, the other to the creepoid who started it all.

Meenakshi Shedde is South Asia Consultant to Berlin Film Festival, award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist. Reach her at meenakshishedde@gmail.com