Technology helps you tell your stories. You blog about your heartbreak, upload the photo-tale of your latest trip on Orkut and crib about your boss over instant messaging. Some, like 14-year-old Saya Date, go ahead and make a movie.

Still in secondary school, Saya, a Pune resident, used a basic DV handicam, a gift from her parents, to make a one-and-a-half-hour film on what one would call her first brush with reality. The plot next door is a version of an incident that took place in her life. “The story revolves around a girl who returns to India from the US. A slum close to her house is demolished. But the slum-dwellers do not get rehabilitated. She and her friends then get together to save their homes,” says Date.

Rakesh Kaushik is a 26-year-old looking for a job. But between doing the rounds of offices for interviews he found time to do what he always longed to. “I always wanted to tell a story and tell it through this medium,” he says. So one day, he decided to create his own version of a good film and shelled out Rs 10,000 to finance his six-minute-long film on infatuation.

They are no aspiring Satyajit Rays or Ram Gopal Varmas but across urban India, a few youngsters are putting the tales of their lives on celluloid, never mind that the audience does not run into large numbers. The easy availability of editing software like Digital B, Window’s Movie, portable cameras and the Internet have also triggered this surge of amateur filmmakers who pan their cameras to capture moments, lives and sometimes just thoughts.

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