Dear you,
The last letter was our housewarming, a quiet half-day. This one is the other kind of day entirely. My son Samanyu’s Upanayana, at our home in Padaru, and the house has rarely been fuller.
In our community an Upanayana is as big as a wedding, and ours ran across two days. To hold the whole of this at home, rather than in a hall, is to invite all of it inside: the people, the cooking, the beds for everyone staying over, the rituals, the fun, happening at once, in the same house. The courtyard, the kitchen, the veranda and the pandal were each their own full event, and every corner had something going on in the same moment.
For the two people documenting it, that was a gift. Suman shot and edited the film, and he gave it everything. He reached for a kind of craft he had not tried before, became one with all guests, felt the energy and documented it all with no inhibitions at all.
Prakash, on the photographs, did what he does best and then some. He went wide, building frames that hold three and four stories at once, because on a day like this a single moment is never the only thing happening. He did not pick one. He went in hungry and tried to catch as many as he could.
Which is why this set is long, and why some of it is unusual. We could have cut it down to a tidy handful of pretty frames. But a tidy handful would be a lie about what this day actually was. The full set, in all its noise and overlap, is the only honest record of it, and none of it could have come from anywhere but this one day, in this one house.
Between the film and the photographs, the whole day is here in its full glory, the full range of moments, emotions and visuals. It is full of life. And that life is the thing that keeps pulling us back, to documenting honestly told stories, again and again.
Yours truly, Sharath Padaru
Finally, the artists who made all this memories — Filmed and edited by Suman Hope. Photographed by Prakash Bonal. Additional Photos by Sathish
