What jugaad
actually costs

We built the first Shamba sequence on a borrowed laptop, in a room with no air conditioning, over eleven evenings. It cost nothing. That is the part people repeat back to us, and it is the least interesting thing about it.

What it actually cost was the version of the film we started with. The original opening ran four minutes and needed a crowd, a market and a crane move. None of that was possible in the room we had, so it went. What replaced it is a single character walking through an empty street, and it is better — but we did not choose it on merit. We chose it because it was makeable, and then discovered it was better.

That distinction matters. Working with what is at hand improves the work often enough that it starts to feel like a method. It is not. It is a constraint that happens to be productive maybe half the time, and the other half you lose something and never find out what it was worth.

The eleven evenings also cost eleven evenings. Two of us, unpaid, on work that may not be commissioned. At some point that stops being resourcefulness and becomes an unfunded subsidy of our own project, and the line between the two is not obvious from inside it.

We would do it the same way again. But we would stop calling the savings free, and we would write down what got dropped, so that when there is money we know what to put back.