Jawa Nomads - Ibex Trail 2019 (trailer)

Trailer released today. Quite happy with how it turned out. 

Watched it on the home TV today and felt goosebumps. 

Hands down my best work so far.

Watch it here. 

Ibex Trail - Ladakh (Day 16)

Tso Moriri is unbearably cold at night, and even worse in the morning. Even so, I wake up early, find the brand manager and tell him I'm not going to be able to cut those Insta stories he needs so urgently. 

The day's highlight is our visit to the Puga Nomadic school where Jawa presented the kids with stationery and study material, and as a thank you gesture the kids sang and danced for us. Some of these kids are sons and daughters of nomads left behind by their parents, and some others orphans with no one outside of the four perimeter walls of the school compound.

And even so, all of those 94 kids are cut off from the outside world because there's no cell network or Internet connection anywhere near that place. Even the headmaster goes to Leh once a week for paperwork and other administrative work. 

We leave the school around 3 pm and come back straight to Leh, driving through the harsh desert past Tso Kar. We reach Leh around 7 pm and go to the city to shop for apricot jam, dry fruits and other things to carry back home. 

At 9 pm we leave to go to Guza for dinner, finish off some more interview bytes and talking heads and go to Chulli Baug for the night. Dolma - one of the locals who came with us on the ride - uncovers a very interesting perspective on the Pashmina trade. 

She says Kashmiri artisans have been working on their skill of making the shawl for over 200 years now, which renders a huge majority of them blind because of the precision and exactitude the craft demands.

And that's a skill indigenous to the people of Kashmir, which Ladakhi secessionists are strongly opposed to. She's got more of an inclusivist viewpoint in that she believes if we start to consider all the world as one, no one should really care about where the Pashmina is sourced and where it's made. 

She also says that the shawl makers do not get paid as much as the Goba/ Korzok village folk claim they do. Seems to me like quite a convincing counter argument until the local LP and AP allege that Dolma's got some stake in a manufacturing unit in Kashmir. And it works in her favour to keep operating costs as low as possible by paying her labourers as little as she can. 

Anyway - the bottomline is that we got a journalistically well-rounded narrative by shooting as many perspectives as we possibly could, that all made sense. 

I wake up in Chulli Baug at 4 am to the LP's screams that we would get late if we didn't leave immediately. Quickly I pack and the Mumbai AP and I set off with the LP in a van. 

I want to think of something that's going to lend fairytale closure to this epic journey - sum it all up beautifully - but nothing great comes to mind. 

I'm just extremely thankful and grateful to have been given this opportunity. Would like to shoot a lot more in the auto/ travel/ factual space. Hope the opportunities come my way, and I'm able to do justice to the ones that do. 

Hope I don't tire out, like I often do. 

Will post the series when it's out. 

Ibex Trail - Ladakh (Day 15)

Shoot.

Early in the morning the crew went off to do bike shots with the riders as I took a leisurely hot water bucket bath (my first in 4 days), packed my bags and had a bread-butter breakfast. 

We left for Tso Moriri around 9 am, and took lots of drone shots on the way. Had lunch at the beautiful lake 20 minutes before Tso Moriri, and took drone shots with one of the riders coming down the hill. 

We reached Tso Moriri around 4 pm and went straight to meet the Goba at Korzok. There was an issue over there that the villagers had gathered around to resolve, so we had to come back an hour later. Spoke to a couple of villagers who said that the locals couldn't make shawls of pashmina because of a lack of skill, and had to give away the raw material to Kashmiri traders who bought it for cheap and sold it to the market for a hefty profit. 

We sat in the Goba's little tent, made of yak skin, and discussed the problems of the pashmina community over cups of warm milk tea. The temperature dropped drastically as soon as we stepped out of the tent, and we realised how warm the tent had been the whole time. 

At 7 pm the hills, filled with stars as far as the eye could see, were chilly, windy and had taken on a quiet, dominating air. Over there it seemed as if the elements were unrelenting - you either lived according to the rules of nature that applied to that region, or you packed up and left. 

The nomads, who earlier travelled on yaks, seemed to have long given up that aspect of their lifestyle, seeing as how the plains were dotted with parked Boleros and other SUVs. 

Our AD also mentioned that the Changthang community was found to have hordes of cash in reserves at the time of demonetisation, and that hardly any family in the region was strapped for money. Lol. 

And yet their way of life, and the problems they seemed to have (plus their grouses against the government) seem to suggest they're the long forgotten remnants of an industry that has sidelined the very people that keep a huge aspect of the region's culture alive and thriving. 

I couldn't get any sleep till almost 2 am, wondering if the footage we'd got was any good to cut a series out of. 

I sat and went through each and every clip we'd shot over the past seven days. 

Quite a lot of it I found superlative, and I almost found it hard to believe this has all been the product of our collective labour, a team that only met for the first time like seven days ago. 

Sitting in my Versova home, going through endless content portals watching both inspiring and insipid stuff I often wonder which side of the fence I'm going to find myself on when given the opportunity to truly create. 

Now that the opportunity was here, and I've done mostly all I could, I think I want to safely say it's the side of the fence I would like it to be. Don't know if it's the side the world wants to see, though - although I truly hope it is. 

But there's tastes and distastes, and there's hardly I can do anything on that front. 

For now, it's on to the last day of this epic journey that I just can't seem to find more (better) adjectives for. 

Maybe it's the cold. 

Ibex Trail - Ladakh (Day 14)

Shoot.

Some local authorities intercepted our drone around 11 am after we'd spent most of the day flying it around Hanle. In the morning we did a beautiful session at the monastery, speaking to the monks. I did a little bit of Headspace inside the Gompa while two monks chanted their morning prayers; it was the most serene feeling ever. 

We asked one of the monks, Jigmet, why he likes living there. He said he's 24, and has been there since he was 16 (he's the youngest of six siblings). The head monk said he has no stress - doesn't need the money, and besides that, he's pretty much got everything else: clean air, a place to sleep and decent food.

Can't debate that.

The local authorities who caught our drone took the local LP and director away for an interrogation. And after a tense hour the both of them returned and said they had let us go, but we were forbidden from using the drone footage we shot. Daniel got sent off to Nyoma for the evening as foreigners are not allowed overnight in Hanle. 

After lunch we went to Punguk, a Tibetan refugee village outside Hanle where we met school children and the village Goba whose main problem is that the areas where they grow their crops aren't fenced and cannot be guarded from crop predators around the area. 

Shot some beautiful content, and returned to our homestay around 8 pm as the LP and AP came back sometime later finishing off bytes with the other riders. 

Ibex Trail - Ladakh (Day 13)

Shoot.

We went to Pangong Lake at 7 am and shot a beautiful lakeside music video with the handpan artist Daniel Waples. Kinda like Cercle. Two degrees Celsius in the morning with a chilly breeze blowing we covered our faces and ears and flew drones around the gravel patch he sat on. 

After breakfast we left for Hanle. Too many river crossings on the way; I crossed a couple on foot and we shot the major ones using drones. At lunch we interviewed the co-founder with Daniel, and later did a solo one before he left at Nyoma. 

In the evening we recce'd the Hanle Monastery once again, and chilled for a bit. The group got beers and had a little camaraderie session going on of their own. Everyone loves Ajhang Le, our 50-something driver who keeps on shouting 'Jullay!' every now and then, and is the most enthusiastic, jovial uncle ever. 

Recorded a star lapse in the evening, pointing a camera at the beautiful star-studded Hanle sky. I drove the Thar around for a bit; from a beautiful patch of flat desert land we drove down right alongside the highway back to our hotel. The director, DOP and I spoke about films and the series narrative over some piping hot chai as the local photographer rambled on in Ladakhi way into the 4-degree Celsius night. 

Sublime.