“Did You Do It?” is my diploma film, made as a part of the Creative Documentary Course at SACAC, New Delhi. My film is a story about the locality that my family and I moved to last year. This locality on the fringes of the capital of India is called Crossings Republik in the district of Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh. It isn't clearly urban nor rural. Its somewhere in the middle and always seems to be in a flux. In my daily travels to Delhi, its landscape comprising of farms, high-rises, villages, factories, a very polluted Hindon river slowly imprinted itself on my mind till there came a day when its unusualness made itself so obviously apparent to me- as if I had been asleep all this while. One long look at the everyday revealed it's horrors to me. It felt like pulling all stops - as if I were watching some theatrical performance that had come to a sudden halt which compelled me to look at it's behind the scenes. This jolt made me see the interconnections of the air I breathe, the water I drink and use, the food I eat, where does it come from, where does the water to grow this food come from, where does the garbage I throw go and where does it end up? How is my everyday reality connected to the larger reality around me? The okra that my mother chops in the kitchen for lunch, it's waste is thrown in the dustbin which then gets thrown down a garbage chute, which ends up in many mounds of garbage collected in a room in the basement of a highrise which then gets taken to a slum by garbage pickers and is sorted and segregated there and so on. In making these associations and while researching for the film, I came across an article in a labour rights newspaper called Faridabad Mazdoor Samachar. The article spoke of how our attitudes towards food and waste are similar and how our bodies become the vanishing points for all these different wastes and toxins. In my film I try to explore the environmental, social and personal costs of unsustainable rapid urbanisation. How a crisis in the environment, a crisis in my surroundings translates into a crisis within me. The film is called "Did you do it?" after the did you do it bird- also known as the red wattled lapwing. I used to hear the bird's cries often while shooting as if it were asking me who is accountable for all this mess- is it you, me, them- the authorities or all of us?