After posting many student photos, essays, and film pieces and following the impressions of leading Indian experts on The Modern Story’s work in Hyderabad, today afforded a good opportunity to describe to future fellows and the general community what a day in the life of a Modern Story Fellow is like. Morning began with a fiction workshop that I have fallen into as Hyderabad offers a rich literary culture and group of talented editors, screen writers, filmmakers and historians. Critique, responses and networking is done locally and on-line. Then the power goes out and I use the opportunity to un-plug for writing a script piece that a local filmmaker asked me to work on. Headed to class. Students gave ideas for a Public Service Announcement they want to do. Leading ideas include a public service announcement on drunk driving and making food sold on footpaths cleaner and healthier. As Bogota’s mayor once said, the difference between developing and developed countries lies not in their highways but on their footpaths. The students began story boarding today and hopefully soon we will move into animation and production.

This year presents a unique challenge to The Modern Story as new administrators and staff at local schools are asking that we complete more of the videos on campus and less time spent going ‘into the field’ for things like community media reporting or documentary work. The lack of props, vivid backgrounds, and unique atmosphere that we otherwise might have access to is unsettling. But, to get around this issue, we tested the idea of using colored chalk to do stop-frame animation drawings. This technique satisfies local administrative restraints, expands the possibility of student imaginations to take form for TMS projects, and also is much quicker to complete than working only with traditional ‘flip-book’ animation. Hopefully we will be able to demonstrate results soon.

After class the TMS team met with th Byrraju foundation to plan a story telling workshop in northern Andhra Pradesh in late March. Following this meeting, I went to hear a talk and have tea with William Darlymple at Saptaparni, Hyderabad which was an intimate but elegant setting that might prove to be a good location for TMS’ awareness event in late February. Darlymple is famous for his travel writing and published one of the best books in the genre at the young age of 22 titled, In Xanadu. He stopped by for a small reading and fielded questions about his recent work Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. The talk was appropriate for those interested in the work of projects like The Modern Story as it addressed issues and problems related to storytelling, narrative art, and using prose, photography and film to facilitate cross cultural exchange in India. This week’s TEDx Hitec City event also shed a lot of new light on animation workshops for children and story telling in India. I would suggest both their professional work and the content of their talks be ‘required’ reading/viewing for future fellows coming to India.

After the talk with Mr. William Darlymple, I went to the Qutb Shahi tombs to see a contemporary Indian dance performance mixing martial arts and modern movements in India’s seven dance idioms. The performance, held at the last of the Shahi tombs, required the audience to rotate around the magnificent Persian architecture as the dancers evoked spirits of the dead into a display that employed martial art discipline of movement and the agility of world class dancers from Europe and across the Subcontinent. Then afterward I went exploring the burial houses around midnight that still remained open. The night ended with a local friend taking me to Basra Cafe, a great byriani restaurant near the TMS apartment in Abids where we had tasty garlic chicken kebabs and byriani rice. I hope this presents a small picture into the great opportunities the TMS fellowship provides.