I first met Tarun during the shoot of my film Forever Young with Lou Majaw in Shillong. We met at St Mary’s Convent where Lou was performing. Tarun came up to me and asked me who I was. He said he used to show my film, A Magic Mystic Marketplace, about the visually challenged baul singer Kanai Das Baul, to his students at St Joseph’s College. Tarun was very generous and offered his Majaw footage for me to use. He was extremely hospitable and asked me to stay with him whenever I came to Shillong to film Majaw.
A wonderful relationship developed over the five years or something that I shot the film. He started visiting Kolkata and would edit films for my wife Vasudha Joshi. He edited her films Girl Song, To Catch the Wind and Cancer Katha.
Around the same time he began working with Sanjay Kak for the film Jashne Azadi (How We Celebrate Freedom) in Kashmir, and Red Ant Dream on the Maoist struggle in Bastar. I was the cinematographer for both films.
Subsequently, Tarun took up a difficult assignment. He collaborated with me to edit my film In Camera-The Diaries of A Documentary Cameraman, which I believe was really difficult to edit. Tarun had to select and make sense of dozens of films I had shot for other people.
Sanjay, Vasudha and I found that Tarun had a great mind and we could leave our rushes with him for a couple of days and he would come up with the perfect rough cut. Then he asked me to shoot a film he was making for the BBC on the toy train in Darjeeling.
Later, Tarun emerged as an amazing still photographer and recently had exhibitions in a couple of places in the country. He and his wife, Angela (Rangad), who is a human rights lawyer, we’re politically very active in Shillong among various unions.
Tarun also ran, for a while, a website called Raiot, which carried thought-provoking writings on Meghalaya and generally on culture and activism. A few weeks ago, he exhibited his collection of photographs and was going to make a book out of them.
He had a handle on and was passionate about so many things, from resistance literature and the history of political magazines to music and poetry.
Finally, Tarun was a warm and lovely person, devoted to his wife and children and yet made enough time for a wide circle of friends!
Though he was much younger than me, I often jokingly called him ‘Torunda’. The news yesterday (January 25) shocked me. Tarun was a dear friend to me and Vasudha and the void he left is unimaginable. Tarun’s was an agile and active mind that is gone far too soon, far too young.
