Latest news with #Sahay
Mint
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Two films show our present is the future we once feared
If Hindi films often turn to dystopia to grapple with technological dread, then filmmakers Udit Khurana and Aranya Sahay chart a more unsettling course—rooting their narratives in real-life premises. For Khurana, the starting point for Taak lay in 2020 headlines that detailed how Chandigarh's sanitation workers were being forced to wear GPS-enabled tracking watches under the guise of efficiency. Sahay's Humans in the Loop on the other hand, draws from reporting that illuminated the invisible workforce sustaining artificial intelligence: indigenous women employed in data-labelling offices set up by tech companies across rural India. Both films don't imagine the future as much as reveal the overlooked realities of the present where the burdens of surveillance and automation fall most heavily on marginalised lives. Since its premiere at Mumbai MAMI Film Festival last year, Sahay's 72-minute feature debut has had an award-garlanded festival run, most recently winning the Grand Jury Prize at Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) in May. Set in Jharkhand, Humans in the Loop follows Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar), a tribal woman who returns to her ancestral village after a separation. In order to gain custody of her teenage daughter and infant son, Nehma—a college graduate—takes up a job as a data-labeller at a nearby centre, effectively feeding information into systems that power an American tech company. Alongside other women hunched in front of their computer screens, Nehma spends her time labelling images of crops, weed and pesticides. On some days, she marks parts of the human body—right arm, left knee—so that when the algorithms are eventually shown a hand or a leg, they know what they are looking at. And on others, she is training it to recognise a football foul or differentiate between turmeric and ginger. It's slow, repetitive work, but essential. For all its promise, artificial intelligence can't build itself. Instead, it is realised through countless hours of 'ghost work", a term coined by American anthropologist Mary L. Gray to address the kind of underpaid back-end labour that propels the artificial intelligence revolution. Yet as Nehma delves deeper into the job, she begins to see the limiting worth of her own intelligence. Her American clients don't define her labour as knowledge—even though the job routinely necessitates her judgement and insight. When she refuses to label a caterpillar as a pest, arguing that it only feeds on rotting parts of the plant thus protecting it, her manager receives a complaint about poor data quality. Even when Nehma likens artificial intelligence to a child, saying it will learn the wrong things if fed the wrong input, she is told to stop using her brain. 'If the client says it's a pest, it's a pest," her supervisor snaps. A graduate of Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Sahay directed short films and assisted Patrick Graham and Imtiaz Ali before helming Humans in the Loop. With the film, Sahay set out to examine how new, cutting-edge tech still echoes old hierarchies, prejudices, and inequalities. As Humans in the Loop suggests, when algorithms are built almost entirely on data sanctioned by the West, marginalised voices and knowledge systems disappear and progress becomes just another name for exclusion. With his directorial debut Taak, Khurana, much like Sahay, turns his gaze toward the politics of technology—how it becomes a tool that weaponises and perpetuates class and gender divisions in society. Like Humans in the Loop, the action in Taak, which also showed last year at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, is located in the workplace. The 39-minute short revolves around Shalini (a magnetic Jyoti Dogra) and Komal (Ambika Kamal), two former wrestlers now working as bouncers at a testosterone-soaked Delhi nightclub. After a serious security breach one night, the club's management responds with a new rule: all staff members must now wear smartwatches, supposedly for safety—but clearly for control. Held accountable for her team's lapse, Shalini—the older of the two women—is pressured to ensure that no one resists the new rule. She complies immediately, believing the management's pitch that the watches are there to boost efficiency with location-tracking and attendance-clocking. But Komal, younger and more wary, sees it for what it really is: constant surveillance. She's hiding from a violent past and her safety depends on staying unseen. With the watch, which has facial recognition built into it, being found becomes all too easy. Komal's resistance ends up as a sore point between the two. But more crucially, Taak underlines, it also turns Shalini into both a victim of constant monitoring and the oppressor expected to enforce it. In that, Taak reveals a disturbing truth: in today's digital world, the working class is often made complicit in their own subjugation. Khurana, who previously shot Chhatrapal Ninawe's Ghaath (2023) and Sumanth Bhat's Mithya (2024), transforms the nightclub and the cramped bylanes of the Capital into a sharp metaphor for a surveillance state. A sense of danger pervades every exchange, every gesture in the film. By interweaving the plot with CCTV footage, the filmmaker employs sound and image to heighten this sense of entrapment and alienation—creating the feeling of being cornered in plain sight. In a way, most films consumed by the idea of a dystopian future often get caught up in their own dazzling visions. So it's oddly moving to see two independent films—made outside of the constraints that plague the Hindi film industry—resist framing technology's threats as a sudden catastrophe. Instead, they lavish attention on structures and spaces designed to ensure that technology's grip tightens little by little, settling into workplaces, into homes, and into bodies. Few Hindi films respond to our anxieties as they unfold. Taak and Humans in the Loop go one step further and remind us that our present is the future we once feared. 'Humans in the Loop' and 'Taak' screen at the New York Indian Film Festival this month. Poulomi Das is a freelance film and culture writer based in Mumbai.
Time of India
5 days ago
- Time of India
Gujarat police agencies in face-off over businessman's complaint
Ahmedabad: A tussle between two key units of Gujarat Police has put the top state leadership in an awkward spot. A complaint filed by a Vadodara-based chemical businessman has triggered a face-off between the CID (Crime) and the State Monitoring Cell (SMC), exposing internal fault lines and prompting emergency meetings among senior officers. The dispute surfaced after two junior personnel from the DIG Nirlipt Rai-headed SMC, which reports directly to DGP Vikas Sahay, entered the office of DIG Parikshita Rathod of CID (Crime) earlier this week. They questioned her and another IPS officer about pending files related to complaints, including one involving a Rs 15 crore fraud allegedly committed by a foreign company. "She initially responded as they cited instructions from the DGP," said a senior police officer. "But beyond a point, she refused to entertain the two officers who were junior to her. The two were asked to leave the CID (Crime) office," said a police source. The fallout led to the suspension of a PSI for delay in processing an application. The businessman, known to be close to a senior IPS officer formerly posted in CID (Crime), had approached police higher-ups with support from another IPS officer of the 2013 batch after he felt no action was being taken on his complaint. A source in CID (Crime) said, "The complaint was filed four months ago. No steps were taken. The 2013-batch officer informed Rai about the case, who apprised DGP Sahay about the issue." The internal tensions became widely discussed by Thursday night. By Friday morning, DGP Sahay convened a closed-door meeting with DIG Rathod, the second IPS officer, and DIG Rai to de-escalate the matter. Get the latest lifestyle updates on Times of India, along with Eid wishes , messages , and quotes !
Time of India
24-05-2025
- Time of India
Cyber cons fake H'bag DC's profile on FB
Hazaribag: Fraudsters cheating people through fake social media profiles of govt officials is not new in Jharkhand. But in a bold new recent case, cyber criminals created a fake account of Hazaribag deputy commissioner Nancy Sahay, a trend which is worrying, police said. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Befriending several people on Facebook, the fraudsters then sought money from them. After the issue came to light, Sahay urged people to remain cautious on social media and not to blindly accept requests from strangers or suspects in any way. A police officer in the cyber cell said, "This is a worrying trend where cyber criminals are misleading the public by exploiting the credibility of high-ranking officials and attempting to extort money from them. Not only was a fake Facebook account of Sahay cretaed, but there was also a case of chatting with people with the intention of extorting money using her official photo." The officer said that cyber criminals created a fake Facebook profile using the name, photo, and designation of the DC. Friend requests were then sent to people from this fake profile, making them believe they are connecting with Sahay herself. Once a person accepted the friend request, the criminals demand money through Facebook Messenger by making various excuses. This can be in the name of a personal emergency, a donation for a project, or any other type of help. According to police officials, cheating by creating a fake account in the name of a DC is a serious cybercriminal case. Taking the issue seriously, police officials said efforts were underway to trace the fraudsters using digital footprints and arrest them. Meanwhile, Sahay appealed to all residents of the district, officials, relatives, and well-wishers not to react in any way to such fake Facebook accounts and to report and block them.
Indian Express
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Humans in the Loop explores how AI clashes with traditional belief systems
When Humans in the Loop's protagonist Nehma, a tribal data labeller at a centre in Jharkhand, is pulled up by her supervisor, she stands her ground and clarifies that the 'insect', which their Western client want to be labelled as a 'pest', is the one that protects the ecosystem by consuming rotten leaves. Nehma argues: 'AI is like a child. If you teach it wrong things, it will pick up those.' As the world is increasingly getting impacted by artificial intelligence (AI), Nehma represents traditional wisdom, rooted in nature. Humans in the Loop, written and directed by Aranya Sahay, is a Hindi and Kurukh language movie that follows Nehma (essayed by Sonal Madhushankar), whose job at a data centre in a remote area in Jharkhand involves labelling data to train AI models. Nehma takes up this job after returning to her village with her daughter Dhaanu and toddler son Guntu following her separation from her husband. As part of her 'data labelling' job, she learns to tag images to help algorithms distinguish objects. Even as Nehma struggles to learn the ropes of her job, the movie also highlights her internal conflict. Living close to a forest, she tries to reconnect with her tribal roots and nature. However, the differences between Nehma and Dhaanu seem to grow as the latter misses the comforts and ways of an urban life. The movie is inspired by data labelling, which is carried out in certain indigenous regions of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Rajasthan and Telangana. Major AI firms outsource such tasks to remote regions of India, where labour is cheap. As the narrative unfolds, the feature also explores 'how human prejudices' are fed into AI systems and 'the unacknowledged consequences' for communities excluded from the tech revolution. The movie will be screened during the upcoming Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles and the New York Indian Film Festival. In 2022, Mumbai -based Sahay came across an article regarding tribal women in Jharkhand working with artificial intelligence as data annotators ('Human Touch' by Karishma Mehrotra published in Fifty Two). He got curious about it since he has been familiar with tribal issues because of his mother Lakshmi Bhatia's work as a sociologist and researcher in tribal regions of India. The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune graduate saw this as an opportunity to develop a cinematic tale that explores 'the interplay between a traditional society and technologies of the future'. Following a call by Storiculture, a network of film and content expertise, to develop stories about how technology and society overlap, Sahay worked on developing this story. 'The tribal data labellers go through thousands of photos and videos to make the algorithm understand the difference between something as basic as a chair and a table. This is very similar to the idea of parenting. Like how children learn to differentiate between colours and shapes. That became the central point of this film,' says Sahay, who has directed five short films earlier, including Songs for Babasaheb and Chait. Before he wrote the screenplay, Sahay spent nearly eight months in Ranchi and villages close to a forest near Jonha falls in Jharkhand. His interactions with Biju Toppo, a national award-winning filmmaker, and his FTII senior Seral Murmu helped him understand that world better. Even though the subject sounds ideal for a documentary, he leaned towards a fictional narrative to make it more layered and engaging. Though Sahay tried to tap into the talent pools of FTII and National School of Drama to find a suitable tribal actor, he was not successful. 'The entertainment world of Mumbai too is biased towards fair-skin actors,' he says. Then someone suggested Sonal for Nehma's role. Even though she is not a tribal but a Dalit, she seemed perfect, mainly because of her 'evocative gaze'. Sonal, who is from Gadchiroli district in Maharashtra, stayed with the crew for 10 days during the recce in Jharkhand and observed the people there for her role as Nehma.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘50501' movement plans anti-Trump protests across US on May Day
Protests under the '50501' movement – short for 50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement – in response to the Trump administration's flurry of moves over its first 100 days are set to take place across the country Thursday for May Day. 'Join us in the fight to uphold the Constitution and end executive overreach,' the movement's website states. 'National Day of Solidarity. Stop the Billionaire Takeover. We are the Many. They are the Few.' The 50501 movement sprang out of a Reddit forum and has held multiple national days of action the last few months. The most recent came on April 19 when crowds of people attended over 80 protests at state capitols, courthouses and city halls in several states to oppose what organizers describe as President Donald Trump's executive overreach, including deportations without due process, the dismantling of federal agencies and threats to higher education. The protests Thursday are part of a partnership with the group May Day Strong, according to Gloriann Sahay, the co-founder and digital director of Political Revolution PAC, who responded to a CNN message sent to 50501's 'Press' email. 'We will not stand by as this administration kidnaps our neighbors, tramples our rights, jails judges, harms people in our marginalized communities, and turns the evil Project 2025 into a reality. When the government attacks even one person, they are attacking every American,' Sahay said. 'On May 1st, we're gonna step up to bat for our communities and our unions, because we know they would do the same for us.' May 1 marks May Day, which shares a date with International Workers' Day and is often a day for protests and civil action for labor rights. However, most Americans do not have the day off of work, and planning a protest for the middle of the workweek is a tricky proposition for mass attendance. 'Despite it being a weekday, we still expect a large turnout because the American people are committed to defending the rights of their communities,' Sahay said. 50501 describes itself as 'decentralized' and says all its events are organized by independent volunteers. A map on its website lists over 1,000 events in communities across the country. The planned protests come two days after Trump marked 100 days in office. In that short period, he has moved to upend the world order by cracking down on immigration and immigrants' rights; instituting tariffs that threaten global trade; dismantling the administrative state under the Department of Government Efficiency's slapdash cuts; rolling back protections for transgender people; and exercising executive power with disdain for checks and balances. Trump's 41% approval rating is the lowest for any newly elected president at 100 days dating back at least to Dwight Eisenhower over six decades ago – including Trump's own first term, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Approval of Trump's handling of the presidency is down 4 points since March, and 7 points lower than it was in late February. Just 22% say they strongly approve of Trump's handling of the job, a new low, and about twice as many say they strongly disapprove (45%). The first Trump presidency was met with immediate mass protests in the form of the Women's March on the day after the inauguration in January 2017. The second time around, protests were slower to develop on a significant scale until more recently. The 'Hands Off' protests on Saturday, April 5, targeted both Trump and billionaire Elon Musk in response to what the organizers called a 'hostile takeover' and attack on American rights and freedoms. The organizers said they had three demands: 'an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration; an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on; and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.' Nearly 600,000 people had signed up to attend the events, some of which took place in major cities like London and Paris, according to Indivisible, one of the organizations leading the movement. In Washington DC, several Democratic members of Congress, including Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin, Ilhan Omar and Maxwell Frost, spoke to the crowds to criticize the Trump administration. Then on Saturday, April 19, the '50501' protests gathered across the US in a similar show of disapproval for the Trump presidency's actions. A key focus of that protest was the plight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man wrongfully deported to an El Salvador prison. Further, there have been hundreds of 'Tesla Takedown' demonstrations in the US, Canada and Europe as activists ramp up their opposition to Musk's efforts to slash federal government staffing and budgets through DOGE. CNN's Alaa Elassar, Kristin Chapman, Shania Shelton and Mina Allen contributed to this report.
