Veraval and Alang: The Gujarat towns where ships are scrapped

livemint.com:

kharvas, sarangs and malams, these young men kept commerce and trade alive in the triangle between India’s west coast, the Middle East and East Africa. Many of these boats, also called dhows, would end their lives on this coast too, as they’d come to be broken up in Alang, along with mightier beasts made of iron.In 2013, Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran, from the Mumbai-based artists’ collective CAMP, began documenting the lives of Kachchhi sailors in India, Sindh and Balochistan in Pakistan, and southern Iran, and followed them on their voyages to Sharjah and Dubai.

“A boat has many powers: to gather a society in the making, to distribute goods, to carry people and ideas across places that, it seems to us, are more different than ever before," CAMP said, in describing the film that took four years to make. Kutchi Vahan Pani Vala (2013; Gulf to Gulf to Gulf) is an engrossing film that captures the timelessness and borderlessness of the sailing life.

These men took all sorts of cargo to many ports, from medical equipment and electronic goods to goats.Sailors shot the film on their mobile phones, with artists acting as editors. The film, described by The New York Times as “beautiful and buoyant", is a moving celebration of lives that may seem outwardly dull and featureless, but which are inherently dramatic.

We learn from the sailors’ loneliness their yearning for their families, with spectacular visuals, including unexpected sightings of dolphins and gathering storms. The film pulsates with the beat of the unifying language of the sailors from different countries: the music of Hindi films, the beat of Pakistani songs, and some hymns.I was in Veraval during the monsoon and the sea was rough and the boats were not going