I have seen Omkar Shelar son of erstwhile Advocate Ashish Shelar , grow in front of my eyes ..from a little kid now a teenager with tremendous energy ..he would teach Marziya and Nerjis cricket and my grandkids looked up at him as their hero..
Omkar is both his mother , he has her beautiful smile that heals people and his fathers humility..dignity and decorum... And Omkars Labrador Lucky has been part of Marziya and Nerjis s childhood ,,Lucky is still in awe of them , gets up the moment he sees them and will never jump or try to lick them. like a wise old human he wags his tail and I still wonder who is his favorite Marziya or Nerjis.
Nerjis and Marziya both have been shooting Advocate Ashish Shelars Ganpati pandal ,, thus promoting the thread of my pictorial existence Hope And Hindutva as a Message of Peace Hope and Humanity .
Here I made Omkar my model , made him wear a turban and my stick in his hand ,,and he obliged obediently ,, he is a great model lol ..
However before I digress the core of this blog ,, and essence of the title of my blog ,, one day Omkar along with his classmates from Podar a young guy and this pretty witty Khushi Pathak , dropped in my house to interview me on Swach Bharat , while Omkar shot my video Khushi interrogated me like a professional ,, and I felt like a debutante ,,but I talked and I can talk a lot on Swach Bharat as I have been shooting garbage dumps much before Modijis Swach Bharat mantra was born,, socially or politically .
The documentary was for a school project they told me , and Khushi Pathak this exuberant young lady added me on Twitter ..and I follow her .. she was to got to Paris and I gave her my dear friend Laurent G s details , Laurent is a master of Photography and a hardcore Indophile , he madly loves India as much as Indians love him madly including me .
Well to cut a long story short , after the interview I too got hooked to video , I had never used this medium I preferred traditional photography ..I began shooting the common people gradually , ear cleaners , garbage sites and all inspired by Omkar and Khushi ,, my mobile phone became my video camera , and I am learning to shoot on my Cannon DSLRS through You Tube tutorials ..I shoot bhajiwalas , beggars chaiwalas , barbers and yes I will soon interview Omkar and Khushi,,, who gave this old man of 61..some hope of making this world reachable through videos ,,
And this is my early morning blog ,,I have shot over 200 videos on You Tube ,, I make it a point to shoot 3 or 4 videos as I go for my walks every morning ,,both my granddaughters are vacationing with their mother but Marziya 7 year old too wants to shoot videos like me .. photography and video are mediums that add zest to life ,,I started out very late in my 40s , Nerjis and Marziya began their tryst with photography when they were 18 month old ,,and as poet photographer humanitarian I think photography changed my life ,,now along with my 337,166 Photos at my Flickr stream I have 200 videos shot as is where is without editing at ,,I have decided to learn film making and editing too..to be able to tell street stories there are millions of street stories waiting to be shot ,,
Thank you parents of Omkar and Khushi ,, you are gifted with very bright ingenious kids ..
And we are all talented but we need inspiration it can come from kids too..
“You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”
― Rumi