Yesterday, back in Delhi at TERI’s main office, our team interviewed Dr. R. K. Pachauri, Nobel Laureate of 2007. He is the Director General of TERI. He accepted the Nobel (shared with Al Gore) on behalf of the International Panel for Climate Control, and Lighting a Billion Lives was his brainchild. I am looking forward to transcribing the interview and a couple of others with the solar lantern entrepreneurs from the villages (Lighting a Billion Lives project sites, where a local villageperson is trained to rent out solar lanterns in their village) to put on this blog, because their testimonies are the most incredible, authentic and relevant part of this documentary media project.
Dr. Pachauri, or “D.G.,” as TERI employees reverently call him (reminiscent of using POTUS for the President), was supremely at ease with our interview, a practiced media spokesperson for his convictions about climate change and his projects. He also wanted to ask us about our experience so far with this project. He told us to check out the disco scene in Delhi, shared about the fourteen countries he will be visiting in the next three weeks, and hugged us each goodbye, reminding us that we could make a difference. We all left feeling special and satisfied. He was such a charismatic, intelligent salesman. I would buy whatever he was selling. How about a solar lantern, then? Sold.
We have been in West Bengal and Assam for the last two weeks shooting video and still photography in about six different villages in total. Village site visits have only comprised about six and a half days of our time here, which is hard to believe. There have been some other days here and there where we conducted in-office interviews with TERI and LaBL employees, too. Other days we are traveling to new regions, and for the first five days we were working to get set up, and still fewer of the other days, we get a rest and time to write.
When we are shooting, we have a set of roles that we each assume, although we rotate through most of them. Sarah and Jess run the two cameras, one doing more interesting angles, and one staying steady and consistent. Those two jobs are almost always done by those two, and the rest of us change depending on the day. The other jobs are interviewer, still photographer, sound (holds the boom mic, mostly), camera aide (fetches new batteries, keeps children out of the shot, sets up and adjusts tripods, does whatever needs doing), and lighting (sets up/holds the reflector or external lighting). We all prepare interview questions together or in small groups the day before and we all are working on written pieces and blogging (sorry for the delay with getting them up, we haven’t had internet in about 8 days), and we are all taking photographs.
My favorite job so far is camera aide, especially if we split up and it is just the interviewer, the camerawoman, and me. The interviewer is busy interacting with the subjects, and the camerawoman is generally completely occupied, focusing on the shot. She calls out urgent requests and I try to anticipate what she needs. This includes, as I said, fresh batteries and tricks like standing right behind her so when she needs to backup to follow the subject as they walk past her, the area is clear except for myself and I am paying attention and can then jump out of the way. That maneuver reminds me of saving a parking space by standing in it.
Interviewing is tricky in the villages. All of it is conducted with a Hindi, Bangla or Assamese translator, and we have yet to have the same translator for more than two days. One day we had a Bangla translator who didn’t speak English. Lucky me, that was my day to interview. The plan was that our guide from TERI, Sumant, would to translate from English to Hindi for Mr. Hindi-and-Bangla-only-translator, and then the translator would translate to Bangla for the interviewee.
This double language barrier actually ended up working in an unexpected way. It turned out that the interviewee, a tiny and strikingly elegant woman entrepreneur, understood Hindi, and she, Sumant and the “translator” commenced to have a lively discussion, with me completely in the dark. This shift of power in the situation humbled me and excited me.
That day, in preparing for the interview, the group had decided that it was very important that we make more of an effort to make a personal connection between the interviewer and subject. We decided that I should have some time to chat with her, with the translator’s help, and to prep her for what to expect. During that time, the others would be setting up for the interview. Once she and I had a rapport going, we would go ahead and dive into the interview to try to get the most personal and authentic account possible in this limited situation. We didn’t know about the double translation situation, yet.
We had also decided that in chatting and prepping with her, I should not ask her any of the questions we wanted to have her say on camera because it was proving to be counterproductive to do that. Try as we might, we had been having too much difficulty lately in communicating that they still needed to tell their answer to the camera, despite having told one of us already.
So. I am in control. I have a strategy that has the whole group’s stamp of approval. I have a translator and my dazzling charm and I am going to show this woman so much respect and interest that she will feel as super-special as I know she is, and she will tell us all about everything we want to know about. A personal account. Human interest. A story the audience will feel passionate about, will relate to.
I communicated all these plans to Sumant.“Whatever you want to do, we will do,” he promised. Then he proceeded to do it. Without me. Without my master plan, my arsenal of carefully worded questions, my amped-up, disarming demeanor. And it worked incredibly.
Sumant asked me what kind of chatting questions I wanted to ask. I gave him a couple of short ones, and waited as he asked and she talked for a while, smiling at him, and scarcely glancing my direction. Then he asked her some more questions, and they talked for while longer, the translator chiming in, presumably to help the other two understand each other. They laughed and gestured, talking amiably. New friends.
“What’s she saying, Sumant?” I was feeling out of the loop and trying to reinstate my involvement.
“Oh, she is talking about the solar lanterns and what she does with her day and how she became involved in this project,” he said nonchalantly.
“But, I need her to say that for the camera again. Remember? Well, if she is going to do that now, then can you make sure she understands that she should say it all again?”
“OK.”
The group is going to kill me, I thought. They had asked the translator to make sure that the interviewee understood this too many times and had it not work. The sound bites were coming out, “Well, as I said before…” or as a second, and for some reason much less articulate, version of their original, pre-cameras-rolling response.
As I watched, my face the perfect and completely unnoticed mask of curiosity and friendliness, the three of them seemed to be getting to know each other, and the entrepreneur seemed at ease. Maybe this isn’t such a bad change of plans, I started to tell myself. I kind of liked the way that Sumant was so natural and genuine in talking with her, and I did trust Sumant to honor the goals I had explained. I decided to be Sumant’s support person for this new strategy. I was the foreigner here. What had made me think I was the best person to make her comfortable, anyway?
I set up three chairs to the right of the camera, one for each of my translators and one for me. Sumant informed me that she would like to do the interview in two parts. First, she would talk for a while about whatever she liked and felt was relevant to the topics he had given her. Then I could ask questions.
She had a lot to say about the women’s collective that she was a part of and about her life in general, and afterward decided that she wanted to show us her daily routines. We shot her washing dishes, adding fresh cow dung to the walls of her home, sweeping her floors, tying Betel leaf vines to supports in a thatch-walled garden, and working in the lantern shop. She had teaching her son about her job, letting him help with maintenance, bookkeeping and charging the lanterns, and she wanted to share this with us, as well. Receiving this kind of invitation into her life without us needing to invite ourselves felt really good to be a part of.
I felt like we had been lucky that it all worked out, but more than luck, Sumant showed us his skills as an interviewer and I got to be a part of helping a successful interview happen in a different way than I had thought.
-Sonya