Homeless people on the street are not an unusual sight but an undergraduate student of Delhi University has done the unusual by tracking and filming a homeless man's who silently speaks to the world with his "sab 420 hai" graffiti on walls.
"I couldn't help but notice this man sitting on the ground (when I joined college). It wasn't until a month or two later that I really noticed that he never moved from that place," Jaskunwar Kohli, a philosophy student at Hindu College, told PTI.
"Whether it was 3 am or 3 pm, I always saw him at that place and that he really never begged. That moment I decided that one day I'd make a film on him, to discover his story."
It wasn't until two years later that Kohli got around to making the film "Bhagat" when the Centre for Civil Society announced a film-making competition.
When Kohli started planning the shoot with his friend Aditya Gopalka, he was certain he was chasing a big story and that he would unearth something very dramatic about Bhagat - or Chandraprakash - as he discovered the man's real name was.
Chandraprakash never begged for alms, never spoke to anyone, and only articulated himself with the "sab 420 hai" graffiti on walls.
"From the moment I set eyes on him, I always wondered - where has he come from? He must have come from a far off city to set up a new life, but somehow, after a certain incident, or some tragedy, ended up sitting in this spot eternally," Kohli said.
Kohli and Gopalka befriended Chandraprakash over weeks, taking him out for a cup of tea or even a shave, and hoping to get the real story.
However, the truth was far more complicated. There was no grand tragedy that Chandraprakash had to endure and everyone, including the protagonist, had a different tale to tell.
"The biggest mistake we made was we assumed this particular spot held significance. In fact in the film Aditya again and again asks people if Bhagat had faced some kind of betrayal - and as it turns out, he had, and he has, and he does - but in simpler ways," he said.
