Film Bazaar Projects 2007

proliferation of the descendants of freedom fighters and convicts jailed in the infamous Cellular Jail of Port Blair, the continuous flow of migration from the mainland India that modernized the islands but reduced the natives to a minority in those islands.

But within the rich texture of the island's history and its flora and fauna lurks the overwhelming stench of death. The thousands that died in the tsunami, the hundreds that died in the Battle of Aberdeen fought between the tribesmen and the British army, the deaths in the gallows of the Cellular Jail, the deaths of unknown soldiers in the seas of the world war, and also the deaths of unknown men and women in intertribal rivalry.

OCEAN OF AN OLD MAN is not simply the story of the tsunami, or the seas and one man. It is the stories that the islands had to tell me.