Black of Cinema to Energy

 As a child, for the first time the colour black, came as coal for me. The obsessed Amitabh Bachchan follower in me understood the meaning of black and it's symbolic connection to the society through the visuals of "Kala Patthar" which was shot in Raniganj Mine. I learnt the texture of the symbolism and identity of black and society being together through the black textured rugged laborious hands, faces of Amitabh Bachchan and Shatrughna Sinha. 

Coal and energy became my identity of a fight for fairness by observing "Kala Patthar" again and again. The importance of exploitation embedded in the blackness of coal mine sites became very clear to me much earlier as a child by seeing Prem Chopra repeatedly in the old rented VCR tapes of late 1980s. 

The black frames of Kala Patthar became a metaphor of Energy. Bollywood potrayed to me that Energy was black, laborious, rugged, oppressive, exploitative, haunting, often traumatized in the late 80s. Then globalization happened, the country opened up, I grew up and gradually left my state West Bengal after watching the real black of "Asansol", "Durgapur", "Raniganj", "Dhanbad" from my own eyes after coming out of the black frames of "Kala Patthar".  Gradually the times moved to the millennium. Bollywood changed and allowed Anurag Kashyap, a PhD from Delhi University to tell a story of coal, energy, blackness, identity around Wasseypur. 

The black turned out to be more crimson, crude , raw, layered, syndicative, transactional, political. My personal frames became political and politics of black, energy of 80s became personal with Wasseypur. Energy, coal were not the same any more.

However, suddenly in the late 2000s, energy, black became cleaner, progressive, transitional with Mohan Bhargav's arrival in the village from NASA through Kaveri Amma's intermediation. Gradually "Kala Patthar" became "my home", "Swadesh" and my own home.

But the frames of 80s, 90s, 2000s still haunt me to push towards hauntology of people centric energy transition. My emotional histories of Bollywood frames are quite raw even now in the symbolism, identity, reality, imaginary frames and it is what gets me going even today to get back to the spreadsheet from Bollywood frames through Lacan. This will move back and forth for quite sometime in the coming days!