Total Recall: Two Indias for midnight's children

While an Indian documentary captured the hopes and fears of young citizens in 1967, a French film depicted the chaos

In 1967, exactly 20 years after India’s Independence, the Film Division commissioned a documentary on young Indians born on 1947. The film, eventually titled I Am 20, was directed by bureaucrat-filmmaker SNS Sastry and followed a simple narrative conceit. The interviewees, comprising both urban and rural men and women, spoke of their ambitions, fears, hobbies and frustrations. Some of them addressed the camera in English, while others used their native tongues — Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi. After doing the rounds of cinemas, it was stowed away in an archive and remained inaccessible to a larger audience, till it was uploaded