My Father, The Idealist
The Early Days
The National Film Board of Canada
Burmah Shell Corporation, Bombay
Laurentians & the NFB
North Carolina State Film Board
Expo '67 and Quebec
New York University
York University
SITE, India
India - Walkabout
Jamia Millia MCRC
The Final Years
My Mother

 

SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment)

While Dad was finishing his film in Japan, Mom set up her house in New Delhi. Mom was tired of taking a back seat to Dad's successes, and decided to take matters into her own hands. She began to develop her own strategic contacts. One partnership in particular was made with Jamal Kidwai, the former Secretary of Information and Broadcasting in India. They began discussions about the creation of a very unique school of Mass Communications to be set up in Delhi.

Dad was worried about Mom's emerging independence and her new ally. After his film project in Japan was over, Dad sought out work that would take him back to India, to be closer to Mom. He found a job based in Poona that was 1400 kms from Delhi, and Mom. He joined UNESCO again, to develop rural educational television programming strategies as part of a nation wide program called S.I.T.E. - to utilize the benefits of an American satellite system that was on loan to India. This project continued from 1975—1978 and made great inroads developing the use of educational television broadcast by satellite as a means of changing and improving the lives of rural Indians.

I was then kicked out of boarding school at Woodstock and was shipped off to another school in South India. Between schools, Dad invited me on a field trip with him to a small Maharastran village. It was an experience that Marshall McLuhan would have loved. The UNESCO field tests were in full motion. Dad's team were installing TV sets in the central squares of selected rural villages throughout the state of Maharastra - to see how the villagers responded to the programming. The villagers were not only affected by the programming, but by the medium of television itself. For the first time in the remembered history of some villages, all castes and both genders gathered in the square to share in the collective experience of television. Their engagement with the television experience was absolute. Their social order underwent an instantaneous transformation at that moment. It was exciting to witness. This was Dad's idealism in action. Sometimes it really worked.