EVER THE SEEKER

Filmmaker Anand Gandhi’s next project will revolve around the pandemic and delve deeper into questions of human identity and existence

- PRIYANKA BHADANI

It was 2015. The novel coronavirus was nowhere in sight. Anand Gandhi was thinking about a film on a pandemic. He gave it a tentative name, too: 2020. Little did he anticipate that his idea would one day become reality. That, too, in 2020. The idea has now been recalibrated—Gandhi’s film, Emergence, will look at life in a post-pandemic world.

Though he gave up formal education at 15, Gandhi did not give up on his quest for knowledge. He always yearned to learn about the myriad mysteries of life and existence. It is, therefore, no surprise that in his much-celebrated debut, Ship of Theseus (2012), a conversation between two characters, Charvaka and Maitreya, is about a fungal spore that hijacks an ant’s body, changes its behaviour and makes it a vehicle for its own proliferation. Charvaka then wonders what trillions of microbes in a human body could be doing to an individual. That was when Gandhi’s quest began.

He took it a step ahead in Tumbbad (2018), which he co-wrote. The film set in 1918, when the Spanish flu struck (but not based on the pandemic), “used horror as a means of investing in nightmares, investing in cautionary tales, in methods of thinking about… what kind of horrors and problems human beings can find themselves in”.

Gandhi was certain that all these investigations—about human identity, consciousness, sentience and about what a virus could do to the human mind—could only come together through the story of a pandemic. As disheartened as he may be as an individual to see what Covid-19 has done to the world, as a storyteller his job may have become easier.