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Georgia Tech Student Centre
Theater Screenings, Ga Tech
November 14, 2006
Yamuna Gently Weeps (Narrative Short)
USA Premier
Director: Ruzbeh N. Bharucha, INDIA
Duration: 72 minutes
Synopsis:
Yamuna Gently Weeps is a film on the Yamuna Pushta slum demolitions,
written and directed by journalist, author, and documentary
filmmaker, Ruzbeh N Bharucha. Yamuna Pushta in Delhi was one of the
oldest and largest slums in India. In reality, a chain of 22 small
slums, located on a three-kilometre stretch along the Yamuna River,
the settlement was home to 40,000 families, which housed more than
1,50,000 people and was in existence for decades.
Yamuna Pushta was virtually a
township, where a world within a world existed. In the guise of
resettlement, encroachment, pollution and beautification of the
city, in early 2004, in a matter of weeks, 40,000 homes were
demolished, without any rehabilitation plan and the past, present,
future of 1,50,000 people were bulldozed to the ground. Neither the
Judiciary, those in power nor the implementing agencies, had heard
of the concept called Rehabilitation.
Barely 20 percent of those displaced
were allotted plots, on a barren piece of land in Bawana: forty
kilometres away from civilization. A land that had no civic
amenities and was so far away from the main city, that there was no
source of earning a livelihood. The remaining 80 percent were forced
to take refuge on the streets along with their salvaged belongings,
until they found some way out of their miserable plight. The film
takes the reader into the lives of those poor families, whose homes
and future were brutally razed to the ground. The director, present
throughout the demolition process, as well as a witness to the
heartlessness of those in power, through interviews with slum
dwellers and politicians and interviews with eminent town planners,
environmentalists and activists, makes his point of view bluntly
clear.
The director, also through the eyes
of those who lost it all, tells a heartrending tale of tears,
courage, determination and most importantly, brings to light, the
hollowness of the system and all that, which was once was held,
sacred and beyond reproach. The role (or the lack of it), of the
Judiciary, the Media, those in Power and the implementing agencies
are brought to light.
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