Bang Bang Galore!
A Filmmaker’s BLOGELLA
Written by Steve Rosenberg
Blog 15 (Flower Children)
In India, flowers are part of religious ceremonies, funerals and weddings; these elaborate floral arrangements resembling of millions and millions of cracked and chaffed tiny hands busily working. Jasmine, roses, and lotus: “When you smell these flowers, think of the kids.” It’s a line from John’s documentary.
Now it is my turn to play social activist filmmaker, so I head down to the Bangalore’s city market to investigate the tedious work of creating floral garlands. Floral garlands are huge in India. Little boys are threading flowers at lightening speed. They are sitting in family groupings, laughing and shooting the shit while they threading tiny cloves of jasmine. I explain I am doing a film on the flowers of India and children from every stall light up when they see me coming with the camera.
Standing in flower market with a camera raised to my eye and my translator on my left, I ask the same series of questions I find so repetitive in John’s film. I am waiting for the painful strain in their faces as they thread these garlands, but they are always smiling. Each flower kid, no matter how small, claims to be fourteen. Boys that look no older than eight are primed to say they are fourteen, the legal age for employment in India.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” “I want to make flowers” “What do you do with the money?” “I give it to my parents” “Do you like your job?” “Yes” “What do you like about flowers?” They smell good.” Not much happening with these interviews, but the children are hyper and as joyful as any other kids I have encountered. When I look around at all the adult vendors in the market, I wonder if they’ve been sitting in these same stalls since they were children threading flowers to be used in temples, or weddings.
As I leave the flower market, lost in thought, I try to process things. I am struck by the lack of imagination of these flower children. No matter which child I photograph, I got the same answers. Blank and robotic answers completely devoid of a child’s imagination.
I think about John and his Born Free Art School movement, a school that turns child labourers into free spirited artists. John has a heart the size of a watermelon and he inspires children to want to become artists, sculptors, painters, dancers. I wonder how these kids will support themselves when they get older. Artists need to read, write and add properly and ultimately need to pay the rent. I wonder if the Born Free kids are being deprived of a proper education.
Albert Einstein, the world’s most celebrated scientist, made more than a few profound comments in his lifetime. Einstein felt the most important asset a person can posses in life is an imagination—not knowledge, not literature, not good looks, not scientific knowledge; imagination trumps all. IMAGINATION! Now everything about this whole child labour equation is finally starting to make sense in my brain. Although, the children in the flower market have family members and buddies around them, not one of them could imagine anything different in their future than what they are doing now. Stringing together flower after flower. That is all they can imagine for themselves. What a shame!
