Wasted (2012)

The uniqueness of documentary filmmaking is possibly the ability to record the traces of events unfolding as the filmmaker walks across the perimeter of his subject. And that's because the reality, in its way of unfolding, never fails to mesmerize. And that's where this film was born. It came with tears, with the loss of a very close friend and colleague, with whom the film was conceived. Wasted looks at the concept of waste and recycle in India from an easterner's gaze with a western vocabulary, in a media language that blooms through the unavoidable residue of the global network society. In the old agrarian system here in India nothing was believed to go for waste. None of the Indian vernacular languages have a word for waste. It came as a concept born with the industrial revolution, borne by the colonial history to an ancient agrarian culture. In a time when waste has become a currency of development, both technologically and socially, Wasted is a sort of personal accord vis-à-vis India and the mountain of waste it produces, as it marches ahead to be a global economic giant.