Anmol Tikoo

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Arts Projects (Research/Practice) will explore and engage with the city of Bangalore as a centre for mental health and well-being through participatory audio conversations and stories. Anmol Tikoo is the Coordinator for this project.

Anmol is an educator and facilitator. He has designed and taught courses on cinema, philosophy, identity, environment, development and globalisation for students and adults. He has served as Resident Administrator for Sangam House Residency and as Head of Experiential Learning at the Mahindra United World College of India. He also has a background in filmmaking and writing. Given his experience, he is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

Bangalore occupies a unique position with regard to its institutional infrastructure for responding to mental distress. With the National Institute for Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) at the centre, Bangalore also has some of the oldest psycho-social rehabilitation organisations such as the Medico-Pastoral Association and the Richmond Fellowship Society. A less acknowledged part of Bangalore’s historic image as a garden city is its history as a salubrious, less hostile, urban setting for patients with mental health challenges. In the recent decades, this infrastructure has been complemented by a people’s movement centred on the rights of people for better mental health care, with organisations such as Action for Mental Illness India (ACMI). Even when institutional histories get documented, those of people can often remain invisible. In its first segment, this project will focus on these undocumented histories through feature interviews with psychiatrists, psychologists, historians, as well as civil society members, cultural critics, and others who can help shed light on the different dimensions of the mental health movement in Bangalore over the years. Together, these will result in two or three short audio episodes, around 30 minutes each.

In the second segment, there will be interviews and group discussions with people who use the city’s mental health infrastructure as well as caregivers, engaging them in enquiring into the experiences of spending a day in a rehabilitation programme, conversations with a psychiatrist or a psychologist, offerings from experimental and traditional therapies including those in the outdoor spaces around Bangalore, or yoga centres, or via phone counselling, and so on. Inspired by Esther Perel’s work in the audio series Where Should We Begin? this segment of the project will attempt to offer people coping with mental distress and their caregivers, new possibilities for engagement. This series would feature around three or four short audio episodes of about 30 minutes each.

Using the audio format in the first two segments of this project is a deliberate choice, as audio allows for both anonymity and listening, without ‘seeing’ representations which can prejudice the audience, particularly given the ways in which mental illness has been depicted in the visual form. Considering the sensitivities involved in a project of this nature, the project will take help from public health experts and organisations to vet and guide the processes and the outcomes to comply with safety policies and precautions. 

The third segment would be an in-person public panel discussion about the future of the city as the hub of what could be called “post-colonial mental health care”. Also in this final phase, the project intends to use QR codes as a way of seeding the city with these stories, conversations, and possibilities, particularly at the NIMHANS grounds, its satellite clinics in BTM layout and Sakalwara, and Cubbon Park and Lal Bagh. The QR codes that link to the sound files in different languages will be set up under select trees in these locations.

All the audio materials will be made publicly available online via platforms such as SoundCloud and linked and archived on a single webpage. Material from the different sets of interviews and the panel discussion will be crafted together and curated artistically. For this, Anmol will work with editor and collaborator Faiza Ahmad Khan.

The outcomes from this project will include two sets of audio series, a group discussion, a public panel discussion and site-specific dispersion of artistically curated audio series via QR codes. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be audio recordings of all the interviews, still and video recordings of the panel discussion and still documentation of the site-specific QR codes. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Project 560 programme in the manner in which it investigates into a relatively underexplored aspect of Bangalore's history and offers a new methodology for engaging with a sociologically and culturally complex subject as mental health.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is supported by Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.