While looking back at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in his recent web series The Waking of a Nation, creator and director Ram Madhvani was conscious not to infuse a false sense of jingoism into the narrative. Instead, he chose to focus on building a case about how the incident was a pre-planned conspiracy, evoking themes of racism and prejudice along the way. It is a thoughtful blend of fact and fiction. “I wanted to make something on colonialism and how the Britishers ruled over our country for so long,” he says and in doing so, the filmmaker steers away from melodrama. He wanted the tone to be right from the get-go. “I don’t know how to make a ‘filmy’ movie. That’s not how I am as a person too,” he says.In the show, Ram looks at the past without the burden of invoking nostalgia or undue romanticism. The visuals don’t feature heavy, VFX shots but are mostly shot on location capturing the heat of the action. The second episode of the show has a protest scene which boils into a riot. Ram makes it an immersive experience, employing what he calls the ‘system 360’, a method that involves shooting through multiple cameras for a longer duration, to capture the action in detail. It is a carefully choreographed sequence, reminiscent of the racy portions of his earlier much-acclaimed hijack-thriller Neerja (2016). Actors Taaruk Raina, playing a lawyer Kanital Sahni and his friend Allah Baksh, played by Sahil Mehta, are at the centre of this riot. They were told to act in the middle of a huge crowd. What was the brief given to them? “Don’t get hurt”, Ram pitches in with a smile.“It actually happened in real-time. Both of us were put into the riot. There were a lot of people around and some of them didn’t even know that we were actors,” says Taaruk. Sahil adds that they were told not to ‘act’ but to ‘be’ the character they were playing. “Due to this, even the people who were part of the crowd became so involved in the process that all of us were reacting to the riot,” Sahil says.
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