JaiGanesh – Yeh Jo Desh Hai Tera!

Once upon a time, while surfing though Youtube videos, I came across an interesting video composed of many photographs exhibiting the culture of India.  Background music of that video was “Yeh Jo Desh Hai Tera” song from the movie “Swadesh”, which doubled the beauty of that video. That day I dreamed  of making similar video, and “JaiGanesh” is the dream come true!

One of the Hindu rituals in India is the celebration of Lord Ganesh fest, which happens in Badrapada month (Usually comes around the September-October time) of Hindu calender.  Last year I witnessed the Lord Ganesh festival in Hyderabad and I was totally excited looking at hundreds of Ganesh Idols and the huge crowd during Ganesh Visarjan day.  This year I wanted to capture many photographs of Lord Ganesh idols and make a video out of it, so that’s how it all started!

One fine evening during the Ganesh Festival week, my friend Swamy and I roamed around many areas of Hyderabad and took hundreds of Ganesh Idol photographs. We started at around 7.30pm in the evening and continued the unplanned roaming and photography till 1 o’clock in the morning. We started from Jubille Hills, went to Khairatabad, Husaain Sagar, RTC X Road, Secundrabad, Ameerpet, Sanat Nagar and finally Borabanda. We almost got caught by some cops, as they thought we were also among the people playing cards inside one of the Ganesh pandal.  :) These photographs are uploaded here.

Next series of photographs were taken during the Ganesha Visarjan time at Hussain Sagar take, with my friends (and photographer) Sonam. Well, there was a huge crowd and it was really very hard for us to take photographs in that crowd. We lied to many saying we are media personnels and got admitted to ‘restricted’ areas and took many photographs. We used to climb cranes, install tripod in the middle of the road, lie to the security people etc and somehow managed to get decent photographs. That day we captured around 4750+ photographs. Read more in Sonam’s blog here and here.

We used many Linux and Windows software to make this video. Technical details on “Making of Yeh Jo Desh Hai Tera” is posted in my tech blog here.

Do enjoy video and let us know your feedback. Jai Ganesh, Jai Hind!