SCREENING | Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hu | 6th August, 2023

The film is a result of seven years of documentation of the lives of the street people of old Delhi – beggars, pickpockets, loaders, small scale factory workers, street singers, street vendors etc.The film does not move in a linear fashion. It moves like homeless and migrant communities from minute to minute changing its space and structure with every on going event.There is no one story but several stories. Dreams and stories mix together to form an exciting magical realism. We do not have the comfortable structure of saturated and complacent lives but have tried to tread with people who don’t know what’s happening next.

Ghode Ko follows four main characters: a pickpocket, a vendor of sweet and savoury snacks, a labourer-activist and a conductor of heritage walks’. We see Old Delhi through their eyes – their lives, hopes, aspirations, dreams – and hear it through their various languages and dialects. Patru, the pickpocket, decides to take people on alternative walks, showing them the underbelly of the city they think they know, but this lands him in trouble with local merchants and the police. That’s where he finally decides to conduct one last Dream Walk. It is here that we enter the subterranean consciousness of the city’s migrant population. Together, these walks create a visual and aural history of Old Delhi from different points of views. And when Lali, the labourer-activist, too joins the fray, giving a speech urging workers to unite, he lands them all in jail…Fusing documentary-realism with magic-realism and true and fictionalised stories with poetry history and dreams, Ghode ko… is a love- letter to the syncretic culture of Old Delhi, to its which is slowly losing itself amidst concrete and smog.