Jamia MCRC – the opportunity of a lifetime

Dear Jamia MCRC,

Some gates we walk through only once, not knowing that we will spend the rest of our lives walking back through them in memory.

Some 40 years ago, on the first of August, 1986, there was a hint of a possible thunderstorm in the skies above Delhi, as I walked through your gates. I nervously held on to my short films and a letter for admission to the fourth batch. It was pretty much a shot in the dark for a 20-year-old. I was unsure of myself, uncertain about how life would pan out, or whether any of my outlandish dreams would ever come true. I went into the orientation class wondering how to explain a ‘film school’ to my parents who saw me as a prospective Indian diplomat. Instead, I discovered that Jamia MCRC was an opportunity of a lifetime.

Jamia MCRC, you were never just a school. You were a rare and generous experiment of international cooperation, founded by three gentle visionaries, built on a Canadian grant, shaped by York University of Toronto, outfitted by the Sony Corporation, and the only institution in all of Asia daring to offer an MA in Mass Communication. You were back in the 1980s crazy enough to believe that a handful of restless young Indians could study film, television and radio production, and even paid them a substantial stipend to endure the two-year program. You handed us for free state-of-the-art professional Sony hardware and Nikon cameras from Japan, Arriflexes and Steenbecks from Germany, Nagras from Switzerland and a syllabus imported from York, and with it, a standard of excellence that told us, quietly but unmistakably, that we mattered enough to be given the very best.

Not stopping there. Besides the exceptional visiting faculty and dedicated staff, you gave us renowned international documentary filmmaker James Beveridge and his remarkable wife Margaret, who taught the future storytellers that a story is only as honest as the person telling it. You provided us with Fuad Chowdhury, an esteemed Professor of TV production, and Charles Orritt, the skilful engineer and musician; interactions with both vividly remembered as if it were just yesterday. You gave us the talented Richard Breyer, sent by the Fulbright program from Syracuse University, and our own gifted and articulate senior Amitanshu Das, who stepped away from his career to teach us. You gave us Mr. Farhat Basir Khan, the mild-mannered photography teacher who instilled a lifelong love affair with the SLR, Mr. Mathews, the warm hearted FTII graduate, who made audio engineering feel like poetry, and Roger Connah, the extraordinary Welshman who taught us to read films, images and sounds the way others read scriptures and who, years later, crossed continents from his home in Stockholm to stand beside me on my wedding day.

Jamia MCRC, how do I thank you for the friends and classmates you gave me? Forty years later, I can still summon their cheerful faces without effort, just the way they were during the roll call in the classrooms of 1986: Ananda, Asomee, Chitra, Deeba, Ganeve, Farah, Kadambari, Kapil, Madhu, Naheed, Rana, Raswinder, Reena, Renuka, Sarita, Shashank, Shikha, Shonu, Sohail, Theko and Tulika. Also, the ever-enthusiastic Ritu, who sadly is not amongst us anymore. Because of you, Jamia MCRC, our teachers and staff became lifelong friends, and scores of senior and junior graduates who share our alma mater still greet each other today like family at reunions, on locations, within studios, in offices, across boardroom tables, inside libraries, amid cafes, inflight, on social media, through Zoom calls, during film festivals, at premieres and award nights in distant corners of the world.

Almost four decades later, I remember the American Centre auditorium on a cold November evening in 1988, our striking-looking silver-haired director Anwar Jamal Kidwai sahib with a pipe in hand and the bearing of an aristocrat, announcing a new honour, the Desmond Doig Award for the Best Graduation Film. I recall the elation on learning that Madhu and my film, Middle India Cinema - The Road to the Future, had won it. I remember Kidwai sahib’s words to us, spoken like a blessing: “This is just a token amount. You will earn much more in the years to come.” He was right. But not in the way any of us imagined. What one has earned in the forty years since is measured in a life spent doing exactly what one loves, living creatively fulfilling decades without once feeling, for a single day, that one was working.

So Jamia MCRC, what is your true legacy? It is not the founders, not the campus, not the buildings, not the equipment, not even the degree or the award, but what I learnt in 2 years: to work with passion and live with compassion. And now hundreds of individual voices of Jamia MCRC graduates travel across the world, carrying a piece of you into every frame we shoot, every scene we edit, every picture we paint, every story we tell, and every word we write.

Jamia, MCRC, forty years ago, you took a hesitant young man barely out of his teens, taught him a craft, made his dreams come true, and presented him a life that he would not trade for any other. Forty years on, the appreciation has only deepened, the way the best films, books and stories do with time. On graduating in 1988, I always looked back in gratitude, which I offer to you once again on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of the day I first walked through your gates.

Jamia MCRC, thank you for being you,

Forever your student, and so it continues...

 
Bhuvan Lall

MA Mass Communication, Class of 1986-1988

The 4th batch of Jamia Mass Communication Research Centre, New Delhi