Shalini Kantayya thinks and talks a lot about something many of us take for granted – the water we drink. Drinking designer bottled water and getting clean water right out of our taps, we rarely think of the absence of water. But a large part of our world lives without a clean supply of drinking water – and Kantayya is a real evangelist for water for the world. She produced her very first movie ‘A Drop of Life’ while she was still in college – raising money in bits and pieces for it. She came into the limelight when she participated in On the Lot, a reality show created by Steven Spielberg for finding the next big director. She finished in the top ten – out of 12,000 filmmakers – and was the only woman to be in this charmed circle.
So how do you better that score? For Kantayya, it is taking her convictions and her passions out to real people. ‘A Drop of Life’ is about the mounting global crisis and has won the best short film award at Palm Beach International and the Audience Choice Award at the IUOW Film competition.
“My main passion is using media – it’s integral to a democracy – as a tool for social change, to tell tough stories that the mainstream media won’t tell,” says Kantayya, whose production company 7th Empire Media (www.7thempiremedia.com) continues to make movies that matter. “Water is life and I think as a human rights activist there is no more poignant metaphor than water – the commoditization of water and the corporate control of water is to me the human rights issue of the millennium.”
A Fulbright Scholar, Kantayya thinks the best hope is the younger generation and she recently took a campus yatra to several colleges on both coasts, a mini speaking revolution, firing up the students with the facts about the environment and the fragile eco-system. She says, “I want to share the stories of the mounting water crisis and to let people know this is not something one can draw borders on anymore – it’s happening all over the US too and in quite a severe form.”
She feels young people have the power to change cultural practices and be the trendsetters: “I see myself basically as a story teller and through my films I want to tell compelling stories.”
