In these times of ‘intolerance’, lynching and murder over the type of meat on your plate, the ever increasing crimes against women, re-criminalisation of homosexuality etc, I wonder if this is the ‘free’ India our forefathers fought for. We have become too busy. We do care, but about ourselves, our family of four and maybe the dog. While we can not change everything, we can raise our voice in the hour of need and that by itself makes a difference. The highest form of protest has come down to posting a facebook status or signing an online petition. I believe we can do better.
My name is Saksham Leekha and I came up with the idea of Project Kranti. I have always been a crusader for change in my own way. I was a part of the Anna Andolan and also present at Nirbhaya Protests at India Gate until the very end. I realised that I have the power of music and the quill by my side. Project Kranti aims to be a music video series that hopes to inspire millions of young Indians. It aims to pick up vital social issues, create powerful music videos and hit the viewer’s mind so hard that it makes an impact. Our first song Uth Jaag is about our inherent right to dissent. It is about raising our voice against the system, the government or even our own society if necessary. Uth Jaag talks about a lot of things that have been going wrong in the country lately. It can be seen as a prologue to the rest of the music videos to be released under this project.

That producing high-quality videos is expensive is something I realised after self-producing the first one. We have a crowd-funding campaign associated with Project Kranti. We have partnered with Stop Acid Attacks and fifty percent of all proceeds from this campaign go to them. Acid attack ‘fighter’ (as she likes to be called and rightfully so) Ritu was one of the actors in this video. The other fifty percent will be used to produce our next music video, proceeds from which will be used on the same pattern. Every music video thus supports a cause and hopes to raise some funds for the production of the next.
By Saksham Leekha: