This email conversation took place over the spring and summer of 2012. Ravi Agarwal is an artist, environmental activist, writer and curator. Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary film-maker whose recent work investigates ecology and resistance politics. Both are based in Delhi. TJ Demos Sanjay, you've made several films that engage ecological and political crisis, the resistance and creativity of disempowered tribal peoples, and the undemocratic collusion of corporate and state interests in

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... India. There's Jashn-e-Azadi (2007), which investigates the deadly conflict in Kashmir; Words on Water (2002) , which looks at the issue of big dams and their negative social-economic effects in the Narmada valley; and In the Forest Hangs a Bridge (1999), which documents the communitybased construction of a suspension bridge in the forest hills of the Siang valley of Arunachal Pradesh. What aesthetic approaches have you employed with these works, and how do they address the various crises? Sanjay Kak In the film on the Narmada valley the aesthetic choices were dictated by my immersion in what was a remarkable people's movement, a mobilization that involved Adivasi tribals, mid-level peasantry, urban intellectuals and students. There was a constant flow of people around us, protests, demonstrations and rallies, and the image-making was a response to that. It was not unmediated, obviously, because in India we have a long tradition of 'activist' film-making that reflects precisely such events. (The Narmada movement alone has been the subject of at least six films before I made Words on Water!) And sometimes being immersed in the flow also meant being temporarily marooned in a still backwater, stuck in a remote village, cut off by the waters of the monsoon-swollen river; there was then time for the quieter, more reflective image-making.