In the red-light area of Varanasi, India, an NGO-run education centre provides vulnerable local children with art therapy.

The Film

Water For Birds is an observational documentary shot in and around Shivdaspur, Varanasi’s red-light area. It focuses on an alternative education centre run by non-profit organisation Guria, who aim primarily to fight multi-generational prostitution, child prostitution and human trafficking throughout India. One of four now operated by Guria across North India, this centre seeks to help its students and their families introspect, heal, unite and connect with the world around them via community-focused philosophy and art therapy. Beyond their studies, Guria hope for the young people in their care to blossom into community-minded leaders in their own right, striving for better conditions. By this, Guria hope to contribute to a greater degree of social harmony and environmental sensitivity throughout India and, via spotlights like this documentary, the world.

Annu, Water For Birds’ protagonist, co-runs the centre in Shivdaspur under Ajeet, Guria’s founder. Annu is a former student of the centre and is an exemplar of intense personal growth, dedicated to the people of the red-light area. She embodies Guria’s transformational power, attesting to their mission and the efficacy of their grassroots education model.

However, Annu has not remained unscathed. The taxing nature of her work has taken a toll on her health. Her days are demanding, and her nights are often sleepless. At one point in the film, her struggle is emphasised when a distraught mother comes to her for guidance, caught in a predicament typical of red-light areas throughout India. Annu must navigate precarious situations like this every day. They are part of the daunting task Guria have set themselves: of helping scores of vulnerable young people and their families improve their lives, despite the pull of the underbellies around them.

Guria India

Since their inception in 1988, Guria have sought to fight multi-generational prostitution, child prostitution and human trafficking throughout India. These criminal industries reflect and reinforce the country’s most perilous systemic issues, poverty and gendered discrimination among them. In conjunction with their education centre in Shivdaspur, Guria identify traffickers, participate in raids and assist in prosecution. They also provide survivors with witness protection and rehabilitation, and challenge official corruption through public interest litigation. In addition, Guria seek to reduce HIV/AIDS-related discrimination and unfairly negative social attitudes toward sex workers. They aim to confront sex tourism, too.

This end-to-end strategy seeks to sexual exploitation at a fundamental level: education. Guria envision harmonious communities whose members are self-assured and connected to the world around them, particularly its natural elements. This is what their educational efforts try to foster. If at-risk young people and their families sustain these interpersonal and environmental connections, according to Guria’s aim, they are less likely to lapse into exploitative underbellies. As a result, Guria hope that they are more likely to work toward improving social conditions in their communities. This model, developed since Guria’s foundation in 1988, is scalable, and it has begun to be replicated around the country. In 1993, Guria established their first education centre, in Shivdaspur, with five students. Now, in four centres throughout North India, Guria care for hundreds. With assistance, they could sooner care for hundreds more.

Overall, Guria are visible. Their achievements and activities amount to a vast list, as detailed in the relevant section on their website. Unfortunately, the education centres they’ve opened and continue to open around North India are under-documented. This is where Water For Birds comes in.

Mission

We hope Water For Birds interests and activates viewers through its authentic, unprecedented access to its subjects. We want viewers to think critically, and to emotionally and intellectually engage with the multitude of issues around which the film and its subjects’ lives revolve. This is what Guria’s students are encouraged to do, and what we tried to do during filming. We hope, with further assistance, to bring the compelling stories housed in Guria’s educational centres, and the philosophies they are interwoven with, to as wide an array of audiences as possible. By doing so, we want to:

• add the ‘voice’ of Water For Birds, and all it contains, to anti-trafficking lobbies currently operating in India, including governmental efforts;

• help viewers better understand the complex nature of trafficking, and the consequent need for holistic, multivalent approaches in fighting it;

• and help eliminate stigma directed at Indian sex workers and young people of red-light areas, whose ostracisation is normalised under the sociocultural label ‘untouchables’.

Another primary goal of ours concerns Guria’s educational facilities. To date, Guria have opened four centres across North India, supporting over 350 children. We want to help these centres acquire further support, whether by donation or non-monetary endorsement, so their effective, gentle ideas and processes can be spread as far as possible. We want to help them accelerate the impressive work we’ve witnessed them conduct, for the benefit of so many lives that might otherwise remain hidden from larger structural actors in India and elsewhere.

On a larger scale, we hope that Guria’s pedagogical approaches, via the film’s attempts to capture them, can contribute to debates about educational policy and process around the world. At their centres, the young people in Guria’s care are encouraged to think openly, introspect and grow more comfortable with themselves and the world around them, despite their hardships. The encouragement they receive from their teachers and each other is gentle and constructive. Primarily, students are nudged toward self-awareness, awareness of exploitation and environmental sensitivity, but Guria are most interested in freeing minds, rather than replacing one ideology with another. We trust that schools around the world, regardless of whether they operate in similarly charged environments or not, are similarly invested in improving the emotional and spiritual wellbeing of their students, beyond grades and curricula. The eternal question, of course, is: ‘How?’

We believe Water For Birds could be part of the answer.

From Ajeet

Water For Birds shows that our concept has efficiently percolated down through peer learning, and that some of our pupils consistently form the second-liners. The film becomes an easy tool for all to differentiate between knowledge and wisdom so that they connect the heart and the mind.

The film can also have a ripple effect and take ahead the issue of first working on the self and then working on creating a more civilised world free from rape, child prostitution and sex trafficking. Using Art forms to Work on the self is important to connect and fall in love with this entire existence, and thus shrink by default.

Ajeet Singh | Founder

Varanasi, April 2019

Directors’ Statement

We chose to tell this story from the perspectives of the young people, focused on the positive effects of Guria’s education model rather than the perils of the local sex industry and its workers. Guria’s schooling is the aspect of their work we were most moved by. It’s also the aspect least reported. There is no agenda behind Water For Birds, except that the story be told in the most authentic way possible. The film’s observational approach, which Guria helped us achieve, was key to this.

This was not a get-in-get-out project. We had few expectations. There was no script. We were eager to listen, learn and question, and Ajeet and his team were eager to speak. That’s all. Consequently, the film has no destination. In this way, we think, the wisdom contained passes organically from teacher to student, then to viewer.

Credits

Production Company

Good Grief 

Directors

Henry Gosper / Cameron Trafford

Producers

Aman Anand / Trent Borrow