{"id":201532,"date":"2013-11-06T19:30:19","date_gmt":"2013-11-06T14:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=201532"},"modified":"2013-11-06T19:30:19","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T14:00:19","slug":"power-to-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/power-to-the-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Power to the People"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nIt is tempting to make easy metaphors while watching Fahad Mustafa and Deepti Kakkar\u2019s documentary Katiyabaaz<\/em>: Kanpur, a once grand city, now as entangled in a crisis of bureaucracy and power as the glut of wires hanging above its streets. It is all the more tempting to make easy stereotypes. Here\u2019s the hero, brave, angry and out to take down the establishment. Here\u2019s the villain, the boss of the big bad company, the enforcer of cruel rules, extorter of poor people\u2019s money. Here\u2019s the higher cause, the great, divine creature that is electricity. As the film opens, Mustafa and Kakkar\u2019s Kanpur is laid out for these forces to come do almighty battle for their cruel and fickle god.
\nYet, if Katiyabaaz<\/em> had remained just so, it would not be half the film it has become \u2014 touted as one of the best documentaries to come out of India this year, premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival 2013 (the only Indian film selected this year) and named the Best Film in the India Gold Section at the 15th Mumbai Film Festival. Shot with a great deal of style and excellent production values, this film is more than just a slickly packaged morality tale, a keeneyed exploration of Kanpur the city and the very nature of power, more social and political than electric. It tells a story that anyone in India, rather north India, has to live out daily.
\nElectricity is not just about the comforts of life, it is a matter of everyday survival. Of having water to drink and to cook with, of small businesses churning out daily earnings, of hospitals functioning. Yet, as the filmmakers walk us along the streets of Kanpur, we see how badly hit the city is by a power crisis. It seems that whoever controls the city\u2019s electricity can control the city. In these streets, in these alleyways, the diminutive katiyabaaz (electricity thief ) Loha Singh is a hero, much sought after by the residents. Mustafa found him a day before filming started, a poor man living in Chamanganj, a local legend most famous for walking out unscathed from a transformer fire. A rather anarchic figure, he spews venom at the very mention of politicians, their promises, the Kanpur Electricity Supply Company Ltd (KESCO) and its new MD Ritu Maheshwari.
\nWhy shouldn\u2019t he steal electricity, he asks, bridling with indignation, when those in power have stolen it for the rich? Why not take from the rich of the Civil Lines area and give to the people struggling to make ends meet in the \u2018sheher\u2019? As he proudly shows of his many scars, markers of the threat to his life every time he climbs up a pole, it is clear that he endows himself with as much heroism as the residents do. It is also clear that he stakes as much ownership on electricity as the KESCO officials do.
\nThis setting up of people as larger than life figures extends to Maheshwari as well. The first female MD KESCO has had, with a reputation for sternness, she tries to whip into shape a lackadaisical department of middle-aged men, all taken by surprise at being ordered around by a woman. As she deals with not just the power crisis but also the insidious sexism in her department, she is first treated as a devi by Kanpur\u2019s denizens, a nurturing, caring figure who will listen to their troubles and provide them salvation. But public figures fall hard in the public\u2019s eyes; soon her effigies are being burnt on the streets as she too is caught up in this tangle that is threatening to choke the city and all those who try to unravel it.
\nMustafa is from Kanpur, a great advantage, he says, in a city where \u201ceveryone knows you or your father or your grandfather\u201d. This familiarity helped him and Kakkar get close to the moments of crisis that the film heads for, to capture the tension that explodes, closely: the tug-of-war between Loha Singh and Maheshwari, private conversations with them both, the elections and the riots that break out over lack of electricity. As the city sweltering in heat and darkness boils over, Mustafa and Kakkar\u2019s camera is right there, documenting the rage on the streets. \u201cWe spent nine months on the ground, and got into people\u2019s lives and homes. Perhaps that\u2019s why they didn\u2019t attack us,\u201d says Mustafa.
\nIt is also this familiarity that allows them to avoid easy resolutions. \u201cWe started out trying to hold on to something good in the end,\u201d admits Kakkar. \u201cBut when we got to know how desperate the situation is, when we realised that no side is making any concerted effort to better it, our focus shifted.\u201d It shifted to a telling commentary on the powerlessness of these characters. Singh, for all his posturing, his conceit of heroism, can neither provide electricity to all, nor establish claim over all the wires. The sheer number and the mess defeats him, as other thieves sneak in on his territory. Maheshwari can do nothing when the residents will not pay for the electricity, leaving the city perpetually short of money to afford more power. And the residents of Kanpur remain, as always, powerless, unwilling to work with often corrupt bureaucrats, despairing of empty promises, unwilling and often incapable of paying for power.
\nKatiyabaaz<\/em> comes from a cinematic context where fiction and documentary are both feeding off each other, using each other\u2019s tools to better tell their own stories. Mindful of the fact that, as Kakkar says, \u201cpeople think documentaries are those that are shown before a Bollywood film\u201d, the filmmakers are determined to make their film see a big cinematic release. They are documenting events through personal narratives and the telling of a story. A tradition that, says filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur \u2014 director of that other great documentary of 2013, Celluloid<\/em> Man<\/em> \u2014 is nothing new to those familiar with documentary filmmaking. \u201cLook at how documentaries started. It was by actors who wanted to document reality, to tell the stories of people.\u201d According to him, every creative aspect of filmmaking has been incrementally improved upon. So Mustafa and Kakkar, while creating a film that looks and feels unique, are in fact drawing upon a longstanding history of great filmmaking.
\nBikas Ranjan Mishra, editor of Dear Cinema<\/em> however, does see this as a newer age, agreeing in part with Mustafa\u2019s enthusiastic declaration that \u201cin many ways, this is the golden age of documentaries\u201d. This is a newer generation, he says, of filmmakers with stories not propaganda. These is an attempt to engage the audience, not just educate them. And there are definitely more opportunities for the money that goes into making a film look good, even if it comes form outside India. Katiyabaaz<\/em>, cut and edited gorgeously from 250 hours of footage, tick marks all these boxes, and through the sheer strength of its subject matter, becomes that transcendental cinematic experience that no formula can create. This is the story of city caught in a vicious cycle, where lives are risked everyday to cut wires, to put out transformer fires. And at the start of every day, the desperate battles start all over again.
\naradhna@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katiyabaaz tells the story of Kanpur\u2019s Robin Hood of electricity, writes Aradhna Wal <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":201567,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[7051,7275,7679,3715,7680,3028,7681,7682,7683],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201532"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}