I tend to disagree with the concept of art for art's sake and view all creative activity as purposive – be it literature, art, music or even cinema. However, I have often wondered too how these purposes have been achieved and in attempting to understand the entire process have come to agree with scholars of yore who view all art experience as a tripartite event which includes the author, the medium of expression and, finally, the empathiser who is either the reader, the listener or the viewer, according to the medium of expression. The onus of achievement, however, lies in the ability of the work to be able to inspire a response in the mind of the empathiser. All creative activity is actualised when and only when it finds a resonance in the empathiser.
Having danced for the last thirty-five years and written for about half of those many years I tend to view my audience and my reader with a healthy respect and treat each of their responses with due consideration. It took Film South Asia to teach me that the same goes for every other form of expression.
I was admittedly apprehensive when asked to be a member of the jury of Film South Asia '03 in September 2003, together with Mark Tully, of radio fame, and Mizorams' Lalswamlani, of the India International Centre Film Club (Delhi). Films are not my line of expression. I wondered if I would be able to do justice to a medium which used celluloid images and a specialised technology that I knew nothing about. I motivated myself for the juryship by convincing myself that visual images are just another tool for expression and could possibly, at one level, be judged merely on their success in articulating just what they had intended to, irrespective of the technicalities inherent in the mode.
Watching the 43 films in final line-up at FSA '03 with my fellow jurors, I was not proved wrong. However, in those three and a half days of intense viewing I added another criterion, subjective though it was. Documentaries, I had thought, differed from features by the fact that they presented reality as it is without editorialised narration. I came to realise that, on the contrary, documentaries were all about editorial interpolations which were all the more forceful when they came not just as verbal narratives but as visual images; images that made you 'see' the world, that you had grown up with, anew. For me that principle became the determining factor. Did the visuals add to the discourse on that subject in the print media thus justifying their usage? I searched for convincing visual tracts that enhanced my knowledge of a particular subject and in this way gauged their efficacy.