PANAJI: ‘Bharat, Prakriti ka Balak’ is a Hindi non-feature film at Indian Panorama in the ongoing 52nd IFFI, by director Dr. Deepika Kothari & Ramji Om, as they reveal the quest to present the ancient Indian knowledge and traditions to the society, which somehow appears to have lost the track of the original way of life in ‘Bharat’.
‘Bharat, Prakriti ka Balak’ documentary is one of the episodes of a long series of 10 episodes on Indian Civilisation.
“This is the third episode on Bharat-the name and essence of what we understand about Bharat or what we don’t understand about Bharat; this is what we have addressed in the film. We have taken evidence from geography, history; textual evidences from epigraphy, from scholars – who have given us so much and we have not really incorporated in our regular text books and we are totally unaware of it, and of course from scriptures. We have tried to make people understand, what does it mean to us, that it was not just geography that we found in 1947! We also have cultural traditions, philosophical thoughts, knowledge systems! You will get a glimpse of it all here,” Dr. Deepika Kothari told the media.
Dr. Deepika revealed that they travelled across the globe and collected the documents. “We have travelled to 194 archaeological sites in India and outside, museums, festivals; and all of it is woven with music, dance and knowledge in the film. It is very educative, scholarly, for good awareness and also to tell the world what we understand and inherited Bharat as. This is very important and become a sort of custodian of what we have got by birth, ” summed up Dr. Deepika, physicist by training but who gave up her career as a scientist as she found Indian knowledge systems and understanding of what we get from Indian philosophy to be far more than the modern science that we have, so she wanted to explore and understand reality. “I am thoroughly enjoying it, knowing what my country is, as it stands today and what it has to offer to the world,” she added.
Dr. Deepika also lamented that most of the invaluable ancient relics are out of India now and while people travel as tourists across the archaeological sites in the country, the society fails to understand the significance of the wonderful ancient creations.
“We wanted people to understand and fill the vacuum in the contemporary education system. Hence from 2005, both of us decided to embark on this mission via the visual medium,” asserted Ramji Om.
Ramji Om stressed that although Bharat being the ancient name of our country, we somewhere down the line also accepted the names like India and Hindustan given by foreigners without forgetting our original name.
