India is unbelievable camera-friendly

It’s 7:00 AM and I’m sitting in the Dubai International Airport waiting to catch a flight to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We said goodbye to Han yesterday evening in Bangalore and have been flying all night. We’re on our way to meet Carrie for a 2-week run in Africa including Tanzania and South Africa. We’ll hook back up with Han again in Afghanistan on April 3rd.

India was amazing and kept us extremely busy, which is why we’ve been a bit slow on posting journals. India felt like an old friend to me. Looking through the viewfinder I saw a very familiar place. Our last film Awakening no doubt prepared me for this. India is unbelievable camera-friendly. The people, the traffic, the buildings are all full of character. It’s like no other place on earth. It seems that you can point the camera in any direction and have an amazing shot (although I ‘d like to think that I have something to do with getting a nice shot!) Nevertheless, we gathered some amazing footage over the past 9 days.

While at first glance Bangalore feels very much like other parts of India, it doesn’t take long to discover a completely different side to the city. Bangalore has been transformed over the past 10 years through the outsourcing of IT jobs from the U.S. and Europe. Where there were once acres upon acres of farmland now stand glass buildings displaying such names as Dell, Amazon, AOL, Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe, and dozens of other recognizable brands. Rush hour begins in the evening at 8:30 PM as thousands of young customer service reps rush to call centers to assist clients living in the U.S. whose days are just beginning.

Last week we spent time with an entrepreneur who owns a market research firm that does business with both U.S. and European clients. We profiled a young man who is a team leader at a large customer service center in an area known as the Bangalore International Tech Park. We met an environmental related non-profit organization that works with disadvantaged citizens who have been adversely affected by the rapid growth of the IT sector in Bangalore. That’s it for now. More from Tanzania next week.

Filed under Journals, filmmaking, Joel Weber, India.
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