Journeyings and Conversations

This film focuses on Calcutta’s (Kolkata) Howrah Station, one of the biggest, busiest and most amazing railway stations in the world. Day and night, this immense place is full of people and life in all its facets, experiencing deep misery, playfulness and joy. People here are not only travelling, greeting or seeing-off passengers, or enquiring about train information; many are based permanently as if Howrah Station and its environs is their unofficial home. Since the station stands beside the great river Ganges, the holiest of all the holy rivers in the Hindu belief system, many homeless people have access to its riverbanks. The station, which is the most frequently used entry-point to this capital of Bengal, a city of fifteen million inhabitants, is wonderfully shown as a place of chaos and order. This contrast unites the poetry of ugliness, human pain and misfortune with the celebration of life. Without real dialogue or monologue, this profoundly cinematic work provides an insider’s view of this interchange of hectic reality and absurdity. With a sharp eye, the director, from Kolkata himself, observes and contemplates this reality, shifting it to the sphere of the surreal.