Ekla Chalo | Walk Alone

90 mins | Marathi, Hindi & English | 2020 | India

Credits

Story & Screenplay: Nachiket Patwardhan

Dialogues & Text: Ashok Mishra and Satish Alekar

Music: Aparna Panshikar

Sound: Ravi Kumar and Piyush Shah

Editing: Jethu Mundul

Camera: Navroze Contractor

Direction & Production: Nachiket Patwardhan

Synopsis

Gandhiji’s 150th birth anniversary is celebrated through the coming of age of Kalyani Rao, a wannabe NRI who arrives in Pune India, to complete her doctoral thesis on ‘Gandhiji and Contemporary Pune’.

At home with her grandparents, her work on the thesis faces subtle as well as blatant opposition that she is able to survive and overcome, with confidence to face the challenges being faced by a new generation of thinking Indian youth.

Rabindranath Tagore’s famous poem Ekla Chalo is seen by many as a tribute to  the Mahatma and this song helps awaken Kalyani’s spiritual instinct (and also becomes the title of the film.)

Kalyani realizes that the greatest challenge today is an environmental disaster that  we are unable to face, under an assumption that somebody else is going to solve  the problem for us. This realization also helped me to replace the role of Pune city from being a protagonist, to being a cause for alarm bells that may as yet save our  city from an urban infrastructure collapse.

Kalyani discovers and works out her own ways of self-discipline and takes a closer look at rural life, in spite of a heavy bias in favour of urbanization as the sole means of economic well-being.

She no longer sees her scholarship and academic career as the most important parts of her life and realizes that there are greater issues and commitments that she  must pursue in order to achieve higher goals in life.

Ekla Chalo reveals a transition of the Mahatma to Bapu, through fiction as well as  the nostalgia of romantic archival clips that can help convey his message of tolerance, peace and compassion to a new generation of Indians.