A new photo-illustrated essay book is offering a close, ground-level view of how cinema shapes everyday life in Laggere, a working-class neighbourhood in Bengaluru, reframing film culture as a social practice tied to memory, leisure and community identity. Reel Duniya, Real Duniya: Cinema, Memory, and Leisure in Laggere, created by Eshwari and Mahima, is the outcome of the India Foundation for the Arts' Project 560 programme and arrives as part cultural documentation, part visual ethnography.
The book's central proposition is simple but consequential: cinema in Laggere is not only consumed on screens, but also lived in conversations, routines, aspirations and shared spaces. By focusing on a neighbourhood often absent from mainstream cultural mapping, the project shifts attention away from elite film discourse and toward the everyday audiences who sustain cinema as a popular form. In doing so, it adds to a growing body of work that treats film not merely as an industry or an art form, but as a social language embedded in urban life.
Cinema As Daily Life
The title itself signals the book's conceptual frame. "Reel" and "real" are not presented as opposites, but as overlapping worlds that shape one another. In Laggere, cinema appears to function as a site of leisure, aspiration and collective memory, where film stars, storylines and viewing habits become part of the neighbourhood's cultural vocabulary. The book explores how people experience cinema beyond the theatre hall — through talk, recall, imitation, and the circulation of images and references in everyday settings.
That approach matters because it challenges the assumption that meaningful film culture is concentrated in metropolitan centres of production, criticism or festival circulation. Instead, the book suggests that the most enduring cinematic cultures may be found in places where cinema is woven into the rhythms of work, family and informal public life. For a working-class locality such as Laggere, leisure itself becomes a revealing lens: what people watch, how they watch, where they discuss films and what films mean to them can illuminate broader questions of class, access and belonging.
A Visual Ethnography
As a photo-illustrated essay book, Reel Duniya, Real Duniya uses images not as decoration but as evidence. The format allows the authors to combine visual observation with reflective writing, creating a layered account of neighbourhood life. That is significant in a media environment where urban communities are often described in broad statistical or policy terms, with little attention to how residents narrate their own cultural worlds.
The Project 560 framework is also important. The India Foundation for the Arts has used the programme to support projects that engage with Bengaluru as a lived city rather than a generic urban growth story. In that context, the Laggere book becomes part of a larger effort to document the city's social textures, especially those that are overlooked in dominant narratives about technology, real estate and middle-class modernity. By centring a working-class neighbourhood, the project expands what counts as cultural heritage and who gets to define it.
Why It Matters Now
The book arrives at a moment when Indian cities are being rapidly remade, often at the expense of local memory and informal cultural spaces. Documentation of neighbourhood-based leisure practices is therefore more than an archival exercise; it is a record of how communities make meaning under conditions of change. Cinema, in this setting, becomes a marker of continuity as well as transformation.
For Bengaluru, a city frequently discussed through its economic boom and urban congestion, the book offers a different register: one in which cultural life is not peripheral to the city's identity but central to it. Laggere's film culture, as presented by Eshwari and Mahima, suggests that the city's most revealing stories may lie in its everyday audiences, not only in its institutions. The result is a publication that is likely to interest scholars of cinema, urban studies and visual culture, while also resonating with readers drawn to the social history of Indian neighbourhoods.
By treating cinema as memory, leisure and lived experience, Reel Duniya, Real Duniya makes a broader argument about cultural value. It insists that the stories of working-class audiences deserve to be seen, recorded and read with the same seriousness as the films they watch.