Mi trovavo in America quando ebbi l'impressione che il mondo in cui vivevo aveva perso ciò che chiamiamo bellezza. Mi chiesi che cosa fosse la bellezza e dunque che cosa avesse perso il mondo a cui appartenevo. Intuii che il concetto di bellezza era strettamente connesso con il lato femminile del nostro essere e che avrei dovuto cercare la risposta alla mia domanda in India. Neti Neti è la risposta che ho trovato e che ha cambiato la mia vita.
I was in America in New York city. I wandered among the skyscrapers kneeling on the asphalt to shoot the sky with the camera: the sky it was intense blue and it was far away, pushed away from the earth by the huge buildings. In those days I had the impression that the world I lived in was losing what we call beauty. This is why I asked myself: what is beauty? And therefore what the world I belonged to, was going to lose. I felt that I should look for the answer to my question in India. Neti Neti is the answer that I have found and since then has changed my life.
Nataraja the dance of life is the second film I made in india. The film owes its title to one of the representations of the Hindu deity Siva, the dancing Siva who creates the universe with one hand and destroys it with one hand. Creation and destruction intertwine harmoniously in the dance of this divinity and form the background to the plot of the film, which tells a day of life from morning to night and symbolically a whole life, from birth to death. Between these two moments, human beings live their life, expressing the joy that comes from relating to the things around them: other living beings and the elements of nature. In the villages that the film tells about, this relationship manifests itself as a long and uninterrupted dance. Nataraja tells of how this dance is really complete only when one is "here and now", present to oneself. Presence is in fact that state beyond the temporal and conditioned mind in which one is completely in contact with the living moment. Nataraja is therefore an invitation to care for the moment and to celebrate contact with the mystery of life, where words cease and our existence becomes a dance that relates us to the universe. To buy the book with the DVD: La danza della vita
Manikam is a Tamil Nadu farmer, he lives in a very small village made up of a few houses at the foot of a mountain. His place is a rope bed next to the wall of a white house, where Manikam spends much of his free time resting. That rope bed is the center of the small village, many go and sit there to stay even for a few minutes next to that wise man. Manikam is a man of tradition one of the last in a changing country, his words are profound and adhere to the language of nature. As the mountain is always in the background of the ground where Manikam lives he is always in his place the place that darma wanted for him.