Tungrus is a short documentary that observes a week in the peculiar lives of a middle-class household in Mumbai, which turns topsy-turvy when the eccentric patriarch brings home a baby chick for his cats to play with.
What follows is an alternatingly absurd, nerve-jangling and heart-warming set of accounts about the latest addition, from each member of the family. The once adorable chick has survived his early days and grown into a tyrant, willful bird – forever taking up too much of their space and generally making life in the apartment unlivable.
The film follows the thoughts of each person to their inevitable conclusion – the rooster’s got to go. And as his fate hangs in the balance, the family debates the question that lingers in the air: should he be given the gift of life, or served for dinner?
Director’s Vision
I grew up in a city, in a meat-eating family, where we ate chicken at least thrice a week. So, I never thought of chickens as pets, the way we think of dogs and cats as pets. It was always an animal meant for consumption, without any guilt or remorse.
At the same time, the incredible density of human life in Mumbai has often given me glimpses of situations where the mundane intersects with the insane. In this manic cross section, nothing is considered too bizarre to witness unbiasedly.
On one seemingly normal day, when I met a friend over dinner, she told me about one of her colleagues whose family was living with a rooster as their pet in a tiny apartment in the heart of the city. What was causal ‘water-cooler conversation’ between two office colleagues, struck me as totally unique and absurd. While such a thing may be conventional in a rural household, it was unheard of in an urban environment. I was hooked, and I knew I had to find out more.
I decided to document the story of this family, because their unflinching pragmatism towards their own choices drew me in; who would have thought that the chicken, a staple food for the millions of households and eateries in a country of a billion people, could become an agonizing inconvenience for an ordinary middle-class family.
Tungrus is essentially a human story, and it is because we use animals as reflections of human consciousness, that each character in the film must probe the nature of affection, of loyalty, and even the ethics of eating another creature. The film is meant to give the viewer food for thought (pun intended).