When Rahul Meets Paan

When Rahul met Paan is a story and screenplay drawing from my experiences as an animal-welfare worker. A product of a workshop in Immersive Practices, it condenses my observations and studies about street dogs and the perceptions towards them, into a fiction piece that follows a child who wants to befriend a street dog against his elders’ warnings. It also highlights how animal-welfare workers get labelled as undesirable, through the character of a ‘misfit’ new neighbour in the story’s setting.

This piece helped me realise the depth of my connection with my environment and animals. Writing the short story and screenplay made me realise the layers within this space that I have been working in for the last 6 years, and gave form to my abstract feelings. It also helped me rediscover my passion for writing and is something I hope to use to direct my own short film.

This project exists in between my perceptions of reality and reality itself, helping me visualise a world that I think I live in. My characters are all based on real people, and writing about them as fictional characters helps me understand where I fit in my world, as an animal-lover.