Pahargrunge, Delhi's Hippie Lair

As a country, our collective memory often begins with 1947, the year India became a sovereign country. Both Ritika and I have grown up on second hand Partition memories, carried forward from our grandparents who were part of the great India-Pakistan migration. The event led to a lot of shared spaces between communities, who ended up living together through arbitrary twists of fate. Paharganj for us is a space that captures the essence of that feeling. We visit Paharganj very often, each time discovering something new.
One of the refugee colonies that was set up in Delhi post Partition, Paharganj is Delhi’s original hippie lair and lives right on the edge till now. Situated right next to the railway station, it’s not your regular polished-to-a-sheen tourist spot. It can get dirty, plus it’s always bustling with millions of people, wide eyed tourists to peddlers selling everything from firecracker pistols to hemp and henna.
As filmmakers we hoped to display Paharganj's colourful neo-global character that inspired us to go back to it. This scholarship would mean a lot to us, two liberal arts students dying to see the world and to capture it on film, our first love.