With a digital video camera in hand, Saran decided the film would document a trip across America with his mother and two of his aunts, who had come from India for his graduation.
The film centred around Saran’s announcement to his relatives of his homosexuality, along with the looming possibility that he had contracted HIV during a recent sexual encounter.
Even as he worked to edit his film, Saran also devoted his time and effort to fostering the talents of younger Harvard filmmakers when he became a teaching fellow in for the intermediate film course VES 150 in the spring of 1999.
Randy Bell ’00, who took VES 150, said he would never forget the long nights Saran spent in the editing room, helping Bell with his final project.
“Teaching assistants don’t come in at 11 on a Friday night, but Nish did that,” said Bell. “It was at the same time he was doing his own film, but he was always very willing to be there anytime, just to help us make something good.”
By late spring, Saran had completed a rough cut of Summer in My Veins, which he showed to students and colleagues within the department. The reaction was unanimously positive.
“It was a remarkable piece of work,” said McElwee, who along with others in the VES department encouraged Saran to share his movie with audiences outside Harvard. “He was only one year removed [from college] and look what he had done.”
Within three months Jane Balfour Films had bought the worldwide rights to the film. Soon, Saran found himself presenting his documentary at film festivals in Canada, Europe, New Zealand and eventually India.
While many—including Saran—doubted whether India’s traditional values would take kindly to his film’s serious treatment of homosexuality, Saran received a hero’s welcome.
In 2000, while writing regular social commentary essays for two major Indian newspapers, the Indian Express and Tehelka.com, Saran worked on A Perfect Day, a low-budget experimental film.
With a largely improvised script, minimal lighting and experimental cinematography, A Perfect Day ignored the typical characteristics of India’s commercial movie industry, known as Bollywood.
“He’s been an amazing breath of fresh air not just for gay circles, but for a lot of India,” said Sagar. “He was an incredible force for change.”
As a vocal commentator on the gay rights movement in India—a role he readily assumed—Saran urged gays to demand their rights fervently, without separating themselves from the rest of society.
“Across the West there has been this tendency [of gays] at first of not wanting to be heard,” he said in an interview last year with Tehelka.com. “Now there is an assimilationist movement that has shifted things to the other extreme. I hate both extremes.... I want gay issues to be valid to mainstream culture and be taken seriously by mainstream readers.”
Sagar noted that Saran’s legacy will ultimately be the way he raised important issues through his art, particularly with Summer in My Veins.
“That film will be seen and re-seen by a lot of people,” Sagar said. “And it will give people the courage to ask questions about who one is, to be curious about the world around us.”
Saran is survived by a brother, Mohit, and his parents, Minna and Raj.