Pakistan had been founded in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims. Three months after Partition and Independence, Jawahar Lal Nehru wrote to state chief ministers about the Muslim minority in the country. At that time dealing with this situation he said, ‘we have got to deal with minority in a civilised manner.’ We care for them in our country and one of the most remarkable feature of Indian Constitution is inclusiveness. Both countries solved the water problems and is one of the best example of Water Diplomacy.
Everything that is going between Indo~Pak Relations(which rarely came into fruition), but the solution cannot be as simple as withdrawing/restricting Indus Water Treaty, a deal signed in 1960 giving unrestricted use to its Indus river and its tributaries. We did built the Baglihar dam in 2008 and World Bank favoured us in ruling. But we simply cannot go for this step as well. From Gujral Doctrine I.e. no first use of nuclear weapons , to our view on Pakistan, that is we don’t want anything from pakistan but peace. This water war (if taken forward) will intensify(read worsen) the situation further. I don’t know what is the right solution but not water politics for sure. 

“Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state. Take out Judaism from Israel and it will collapse like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state: it would collapse.”
– General Zia-Ul-Haq quoted in The Economist, December 1981

Let me conclude with Mikhail Gorbachev’s (former president of erstwhile USSR) maxim that “water has the power to move millions of people – let it move us in the direction of peace”. So water is to be used for peace, prosperity & liberty and not for harvesting poverty. India is one of the country which world looks at as a Peaceful country as far as our international relations are concerned.

Born on 28 December 1960 to journalist, author and theater director Som Benegal and his wife Suman, Dev was an avid film fan ever since he can remember, even though he didn’t watch any Bollywood films because they were banned at his house. He was always encouraged to watch a lot of Hollywood and British films while growing up. In fact, he also has a record of watching Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” 96 times. Dev attended the Modern School, New Delhi where he was the official cartoonist and photographer for his school magazines.

After he left school, he headed straight to Mumbai (Bombay then) to assist his uncle, Mr. Shyam Benegal. After working on two of his feature films – Mandi (1980) and Kalyug (1983), he was involved in the making of the definitive documentary on Satyajit Ray – Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker (1984).

Following his stint as an assistant director, Dev made a few short films which got selected for several international film festivals after which he received a grant to study at NYU for two years.

After returning to India, he wanted to make a film but he didn’t want to make the kind of films that were being made at that point in India and suddenly one day he came across a book titled “English, August” which changed the face of Indian cinema forever. English, August (1994) was a story of a young graduate sent to a small town in India to train to become a bureaucrat. The film revolves around the protagonist (Rahul Bose) listening to rock and jazz, reading Marcus Aurelius and masturbating in a room with blue walls in the hottest town of the country, Madna where he feels like a total foreigner. It was a multilingual film in English, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu and Marathi. Eventually, it won a lot of awards including the country’s highest cinema award – The National Award for Best Feature Film in English and also became the first Indian film to be acquired by 20^th Century Fox for distribution. The film not only appealed to the critics but also became a box office success. It is now acknowledged as a landmark in contemporary Indian cinema.

His next film “Split Wide Open” (1999) starring Rahul Bose as the lead once again was about water wars in Mumbai. It also partially dealt with sexuality in modern India. It premiered at Venice Film Festival and won several awards including the Grand Prix at the Belgium International Film Festival and Special Jury Award at the Singapore International Film Festival. It once again was acquired by 20^th Century Fox for distribution and eventually it became a box office success as well.

He then adapted Kiran Nagarkar’s best-selling Indian novel “Ravan & Eddie” a fable about a boy with ten heads. The screenplay had also won the Grand Prix at the Tokyo Developer’s Forum at the Tokyo International Film Festival but unfortunately it was bluntly rejected by everyone in India.

Dev’s most recent film, Road, Movie (2009) starred Abhay Deol, Tannishtha Chatterjee and Satish Kaushik in the lead roles. The film revolves around the character Vishnu (Abhay Deol) a young man who doesn’t want to join his father’s hair oil business, and sees delivering an old truck across the desert to the sea as his ticket to freedom. The film is about this journey where he meets several other characters and eventually discovers love, life and laughter along the way. Road, Movie was an official selection for the prestigious Atelier du Cannes at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Dev is also a prolific screenwriter and photographer, the screenplay for his next film “Dead, End or: How I Learnt to Stop Living and Love Being Officially Dead” won the Grand Prize at the NAFF/PIFAN International Festival Korea, 2014 and is in pre-production. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge about cameras, lenses and calligraphy. Like his guru, one of the world’s greatest cinematographers, Subrata Mitra, Dev is a perfect balance between art, expression and technology. Dev’s film was the first Indian feature film to adopt digital post production from picture editing on the Avid to sound design and delivery. It was this passion of his for movies and technology that gave birth to his revolutionary production program 24×7 Making Movies, this program enables anyone below 24 years to make a short feature film in 24 hours.

Dev has written and will be directing “Bombay Samurai”, a neo-noir set in Bombay about an elusive hit-man sometime in late 2017. He is also writing a film on the life of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan with English writer and actor Stephen Fry which he calls his passion project.

Dev Benegal’s work represents a different cinema altogether, it is far different from the popular mainstream indian cinema. The best things about his films are its characters and his unique style of telling a narrative. Dev’s films have totally redefined contemporary Indian cinema. Over the years, Dev’s work has inspired many and in this era, where there is a lot of noise surrounding commercial mainstream movies and content driven movies are suffering, we need him and filmmakers like him the most to step up. Here’s hoping to see a Dev Benegal film on the celluloid soon!

You can reach Dev Benegal on Twitter : @benegal

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– Oscar Wilde

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