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The Spinning Experience

50 words:
The Spinning Experience follows 30 IIT Bombay students while they learn the slow and gentle art of spinning on the charkha. The yarn breaks, but the spirit does not as new meaning is created for age-old ideas of skill, labour, sustainability, craft and history.
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100 words:
Is the charkha an obsolete technology? Is it a slow and un-productive relic of the past that we remember only because of Gandhi or its role in the freedom struggle? Can it play any role at all in the many crises we are facing today?

The Spinning Experience follows 30 IIT Bombay students while they learn the slow and gentle art of hand-spinning on the charkha over three days and engage with these and other questions as they go along. The learning unfolds in many ways... the yarn breaks, but the spirit does not as new meaning is created for age-old ideas of skill, labour, sustainability, history and craft.
---------------------------------------
200 words:
Is the charkha an obsolete and irrelevant technology? Is it a slow and un-productive relic of the past that we remember only because of Gandhi or its role in the freedom struggle? Can it play any role at all in the many crises we are facing today?

The Spinning Experience follows 30 IIT Bombay students while they learn the slow and gentle art of hand-spinning on the charkha over three days and engage with these and other questions as they go along. One sees a churn of the narrative through a combination of discussion and debate but more importantly experiential learning and the possibility of creating tacit knowledge and understanding. Learning unfolds in unexpected ways. The yarn breaks regularly but then the rhythm begins to set in and new understandings are created for ideas of skill, labour, history, craft and sustainability.

The highlight of course is a small length of cotton yarn students take with them as a real tangible output of what they have 'created' themselves.

  • Pankaj Sekhsaria
    Director
    The Handloom Process, 2000; The Yellow Haze, 1997
  • Pradeep Patil
    Editor
  • Pankaj Sekhsaria
    Producer
  • Madhav Sahasrabudhe
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Short
  • Genres:
    Educational, Environmental, Sustainability
  • Runtime:
    16 minutes 50 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    December 15, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    0 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    India
  • Country of Filming:
    India
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Rishi Valley School, via Madanapalle, India. “KFI Teachers’ Conference: Teachers in a Krishnamurti School - Reaching Beyond Curriculum and Pedagogy”. Plenary presentation screening at Pune for School teachers.
    Pune
    India
    November 25, 2024
  • IIT Mandi, India. “4th Young Graduate Meet, 2024 - Interdisciplinary Approaches to South-Asian Ecology”. Plenary Talk.
    Mumbai
    India
    October 25, 2024
  • Nag Auditorium, VMCC, IIT Bombay, India. “Sustainable Rural Development: Empowering Communities for Progress” Session 4: Learning with Gandhi: Experiments in Contemporary Education in India.
    Mumbai
    India
    October 5, 2024
Director Biography - Pankaj Sekhsaria

Pankaj Sekhsaria is an academic, researcher, journalist and an occasional film-maker. He studied media and film-making at Jamia Millia Islamia in the late 1990s but then went on to work with the environmental NGO Kalpavriksh, concentrating on the issues of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He has done five books on the islands, writes regularly for the media and also done photo-exhibitions on a diversity of themes ranging from nature in the city to handlooms to the islands.

He has a PhD in Science and Technology Studies; his thesis was based on a four-year ethnographic and sociological study of life inside four nanoscience and nanotechnology labs in three cities in India. He is currently associate professor at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (C-TARA) at IIT Bombay, where his course that explores issues at the intersection of technology, society and development has a three-day workshop on hands-spinning that the class takes every semester.

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