In the film the Italian prisoner Dessi France Matwala, who is a poet and tabla player, says, "I haven't seen the world for many years. I was going to ask you whether it was still there." A Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) production directed by Anjali Monteiro and K P Jayasankar, the video film has focused on its subjects as artists and not prisoners. When it was screened at the NCPA on Wednesday, the reaction to the former inmate Ghanshyam Gupta was not a sympathy wave but an enthusiastic reception to the calibre of his poetry.

Says Jayasankar, "We wanted to explore that socially constructed divide between `us' and `them'. Prisoners are seen as deviants by theoutside world but for us it was an artist to artist interaction." Which is why the first question that would come to mind is not answered in the film. The prisoners are never asked what they are in for. "If I am introduced as Jayasankar, the tax evader, that would immediately create a bias." And the aim of the film was, "to set people thinking along lines they perhaps never would have," explains Monteiro.

One of the prisoners, Harrison Cudjoe, a Nigerian who won the Poet of the Year award in US in 1995, was in the prison for 11 years waiting for his case to come up. Charged under Narcotics, Drugs, Psychotropic Substances Act, he was acquitted a month ago due to the efforts of the film directors. "What was scary was how easy it was to get him out. If you have no money or no family, you could get lost forever in jail," says Jayasankar. Cudjoe says in the film, "I have realised here this is a small prison and the outside is a bigger prison." Gupte, who admits that his punishment was justified and set him onthe right track, says, "In the prison you learn to become your own friend. Whereas outside you see yourself only as somebody's son, brother or husband. And once you know yourself, you will always be okay." Though he, Cudjoe and Matwala along with poets Kishore Godhke, Santosh Shinde and Sahebrao Phadtare, who writes in the abhang style, have all coped with their pain creatively, prison does not make poets of all. "The food you are given is just enough to keep you alive. There are so many who give up hope completely," says Gupta. And even inside, some prisoners are more equal than the others. The rich have access to better food, even drugs.

"The police is also a criminal. I complained about the charas and ganja coming in and for three months I was in chains," says Gupta. Gupta, who writes in Hindi, is a struggling writer. He recently got a break and is writing for a television serial Shaktiman, currently on air. Cudjoe too is living in Mumbai and is trying to get his passport back while figuring out a way toearn a living. Phadtare who was released three months ago has gone back to his village and plans to become a sanyasi. In the film he says, "I made a mistake and I was punished. But a life sentence of 18 years at the age of 22 it was too strong. All the hope is gone. Punishing is all right but what about rehabilitation. Now I can't do anything with my life." His complaint is that instead of restructuring the lives of prisoners, most are displaced forever, never really able to take their place back in the world.