Human beings deformed and decimated, their eyes sunken, bones bulged out and their legs scrawny and frail, too frail that the shrunken bodies are curled up either on chairs or on beds. The skeletal beings look unearthly and the sounds they produce hardly human. When they laugh, they do it with a squirming jerk in hoarsely pitched tones, leaving our ears pierced.
These are a few images the documentary ‘A Pestering Journey’, directed by K R Manoj, offers. The intensity and shock of these images are still unnerving, though these relics of Endosulfan-devoured mankind in Kasargod have been recurring in media for quite a while.
On Sunday, the documentary was screened at a fest organised in connection with the commemoration of documentary maker C Sarath Chandran, who died last year. The 65-minute-long ‘A Pestering Journey’ is not an acid-tinged harangue on environmental pollution. The journey is smooth and seems so humane. The director says that the entire concept of the documentary is shaped on pests. ‘’When we wanted to make a film on pests, it would have looked incomplete without people in Kasargod. The film is a journey in search of an answer to the question, ‘Who is actually the pest?’’’ says K R Manoj.
Pursuing more ‘pests’, the film also traverses to a village called Bhatinda in Punjab along with a group of cold-stricken, weak-looking villagers wrapped up with shawls in a train. The train is from Bikaner, from where many of these travellers have boarded. It is curiously named ‘Cancer train’. A lady with profusely swollen cheeks introduces herself as a cancer-afflicted patient returning to her village after a surgery. She does not even know what kind of cancer she is affected with. One by one, each passenger reveals to be having cancer and all of them work as labourers in the cotton fields of Bhatinda. Bikaner is where they can afford the cheapest cure for cancer.
Slowly, the documentary traces the cause of cancer to the cotton fields. However, the director of cancer institute in Bikaner finds that education, increased means of transportation and awareness are the reasons for the incidence of cancer among the agricultural labourers. ‘’Scientists are always hesitant to see the co-relation between pesticides and strange diseases. It is the people who suffer. The committees come and go saying that everything is fine. But they won’t dare drink water from that locality,’’ says Manoj, who spent six months in Kasargod with his cameraman Shehanad Jalal and sound recordist Harikumar.
He recounts the horrifying images which they saw in their journey, but could not shoot. ‘’When we were in the train to Bhatinda, a lady was vomiting continuously. We wanted to film that. But we didn’t because it could have been more violent than what happened in Kasargod.’’
The film throws up reports and studies on Endosulfan usage in between, all claiming that the chemical is perfectly safe. The film does not demand anything, but reminds viewers that there are a group of people in the farthest corner of Kerala who were fated to endure in silence the spraying of venom over their heads for 28 years. ‘’The worst aspect is that even the coming generations won’t be spared,’’ says Manoj.
aswin@newindainexpress.com
