Film By: Puneet Raj Singh, Nikita Sharma, Apoorva Sharma
Mentored By: Jabeen Merchant
City: Chandigarh
Through the play of dappled light, the film reflects on the lives of Chandigarh’s informal workers: visible yet overlooked, ever-present yet structurally invisible. These lives exist in the shadows, not in hiding, but not entirely in the light of urban recognition. Through the stories of a barber, a chaiwala, a kelewala and labourers, we explore how their presence, among the trees of Chandigarh, offer affordable services and help generate a social public realm for the lower-income classes. Chandigarh’s planned 74,000-tree cover offers much-needed relief from the elite and programmed, hard, paved and monotonous edges of the roads and sectoral grids. These workers occupy this shade without tenancy or title, instead operating under intermittent licenses issued post the 2014 Street Vendor Survey. As they anchor themselves with these trees, they momentarily step outside their ‘worker’ identities to rest, to play cards, to share tea or gossip, and to simply be.