The Art of Aping

Short Film

‘Art of Aping’ is an audio visual guide of how one can forget about one’s own values and ethos to imitate and imbibe other’s traits/habits without checking to see if it even suits them but just because they seem aspirational. The film, satirically addresses the Western influence on us, Indians, on how this mentality of following our western counterparts blindly has gotten us where we are today. The Western imprint is so deep that we Indians no longer want to leave it, even though they left India 70 years ago. We easily discard our age-old customs and home-grown techniques to follow the Western ways. The usual chores of dressing, talking, eating or even defecating, are no longer done the way they used to be. Giving more weightage to convenience than correctness defines a Western way of life and the suitability of the Western ways in the context of our own culture, society, climate, geography, or system, is something we don’t care about anymore.
The protagonist of the film chooses to follow the West in every situation that he has been put into. The film has mixed satire, humour and exaggerated sarcasm to talk about the vanity of our choices and further underline how the Indian ways are not considered ‘cool’ anymore.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Have a look at what went behind the fun soundtrack for Art of Aping. Our studio sessions, when seen without any context, would probably seem like a madhouse. Case in point – our Music Director, Rajat Dholakia and Human Percussionist, Vivek Rajgopalan. Watch them groove and do their enjoyable jugal bandi!