Shram

Shram (Labour / Effort) was our DP-IV Documentary project at the National Institute of Design, guided by Savyasachi Anju Prabir. Jayasri directed and edited it, and I shot it.

About twenty elderly security guards and utility staff at NID, whom students call “Kakas”, had worked on campus for ten to twenty years. A private contractor let them go with three days’ notice, because they were over forty-five.

The film follows them to the Deputy Chief Labour Commissioner’s office at Shram Bhavan, where they argued for their gratuity and for someone to acknowledge what had happened. Between hearings, we talk to people around campus: students who were fond of the guards, a contractor who disowned them, and an administration that stayed out of it.

We kept the camera small and out of the way.

• In the hearing rooms. Conciliation rooms and government offices aren’t places to move around in. I stayed still and watched the workers hand their papers to the officers and wait.
• The journal. Jayasri kept a handwritten journal of dates, quotes, and questions about whether students were complicit and what we owed the people we were filming. I shot it in close-up, and it runs through the film.
• Daylight only. Everything else was lit by sunlight and the campus’s own lights, at the guard posts, gates and corridors. We didn’t dress any of it up.