Street Photography in Vasai

I am happy when my best friends have their arms around me :)

"When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!"  — Ted Grant

{Continue reading...}

Picture of the day: Hired cooks!

Men who toil to make our festivals sweet... all with a smile on their face, never mind the sweat and the grime! Clicked during the middle of last year.

Wish you all a very happy Makar Sankranti :)

Shades of melancholy in black & white...

In my "humble" opinion Black & White (B&W) photography is perhaps one of the purest forms of photography. B&W stands on its own feet - on the strength of composition and mood, without the glamour (so to speak) of colour. I have also generally found that street photography is more appealing when seen in B&W - maybe it's because B&W brings out the starkness and hence help convey the mood better. To paraphrase it in a literary fashion - street-photography has the onerous task of capturing the shades of grey in our society and what better than using the shades of grey to portray them! It could also be because the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson (which were in B&W), the legendary photographer and father of street photography, continue to inspire photographers to this day, resulting in an immense amount of B&W work being done despite the colour capabilities of today's cameras.

Initially I had planned to share these pictures as part of another larger theme-based post, but then I had a feeling that they would get lost somewhere in the array of pictures (like so many of my other portraitures). Hence, this small post depicting some of the shades of melancholy which I observed recently.

A trumpet player in a Western-styled band

Wonder why the faces of most trumpet players appear melancholic and hardened to me? This man was otherwise quite jolly and would wink at me after finishing his bit!

{Continue reading...}

Musical Bands of Mumbai 1 – the Dhol-tasha band

Young boy playing cymbals

The arrival of the month of August heralds a long period of celebration for the majority of Indians. Starting with the Parsi New Year and ending with Christmas, it encompasses diverse festivals like Onam, Janamashthami, Ganesh Chaturthi, Paryushana, Eid, Navratri, Dussehra, and Diwali. It is the season of revelry, food (read sweets), music, penance, et al. In this and subsequent posts, I am sharing with you the images of people who get us swinging to their distinctly folksy beats during these festivals - the musical bands. Our first band is Maharashtra's famed Dhol-Tasha band.

If during a festival in Maharashtra you have heard the drums roll, clatter and create a deep resounding sound, then in all probability you have heard the dhol-tasha band play. As the name suggests, the band members play an assortment of drums (large and small) along with hand cymbals to create various taal (rhythm) synchronisations. The group members (more than 10 in number) are both young and old and sometimes also include children. Of late even women have started joining these bands (that should impress the women's rights groups)! During the Ganesh Chaturthi festival one gets to see the best of these groups. They typically rehearse for months and develop new taals to be in the reckoning of the large Ganesh mandals who hire them for the processions.

{Continue reading...}

Say cheese! It's the World Photography Day!

Today, across national boundaries, most photography lovers like me are celebrating the World Photography Day. Photography is a hobby which gives me immense joy and helps me discover this world in ways different from a casual observer. The thrill of having visualised something (a story or a moment) and being able to capture it "forever" is something indescribable. Photography has now been around for over 150 years and yet, as a medium of communication, it still remains the most powerful. This is owing to its ability to convey reality as well as the mood in a manner that directly appeals to the sensibility of the viewer.

On this day, I am sharing with you one of my favourite clicks - a picture that I took recently on a rainy Sunday morning while out on a nature walk inside the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai. While I was strolling inside the park and enjoying the greenery, I came across a house where a boy, seated outside on the rocks, was quietly observing a heated conversation between two people. As I observed closely, I saw that his face was melancholic (probably saddened by the commotion), he was poorly dressed and was looking in a direction away from the bicycle leaning against the house. That's when I took this picture...

Whither Childhood! - one of my favourite clicks!

{Continue reading...}

Lahaul - Spiti Valley Jeep Safari: Notes & anecdotes from a 7 day odyssey through the middle land!

Connoisseur’s delight…door to freedom...

Komic

If you are not averse to any of these -

• living at an average altitude of 4,250 metres in a cold desert;
• travelling on narrow (single lane), gravel and water filled roads winding through the Himalayas, which stare thousands of feet down into a violent river, and where road blocks due to landslides and snowfalls are as common as the day and night;
• living without newspaper and telecommunication network (save for BSNL) in a place unscathed by modernity;

then Spiti is the place for you - the connoisseur traveller, the solitude seeker, the adventurer!

Spiti Valley came on my radar a couple of years back while researching some exotic driving holidays in the Himalayas. I was instantly taken in. Ladakh had been on my travel list for over seven years (since the time the populace had not even heard about it), but seeing the swarm of casual tourists thronging to it since the release of 3 Idiots, I decided that it had to be Spiti that I must visit this time around, before the hotels over there too started dishing out thalis!

View of Spiti Valley from Kye Monastery

Spiti, which means ‘the middle country’, is the land of ragged and snow capped mountains that reach out to the clear deep blue skies. Here, in the cold desert, trees are scarce and the moonscape expansive. Spiti is the land of several perennial rivers - Spiti, Pin, Chandra - whose gurgling sounds will soothe you in the night and whose ferocity will awe you when you travel alongside them in the day time. Ah, and not to mention the placid, azure blue lakes like Chandra Taal, Nako, Dhankar. The observer would also be struck by some of the most beautiful canyons and the most unusual clay and rock formations along the river bed and in the mountains. The continuity of the landscape is only broken by numerous waterfalls and glaciers, including one of world's largest non-polar glaciers - Bara Shigri.

{Continue reading...}

Art of Rajasthan

A collage depicting the various expressions of art in the State. Picture shows traditional folk musicians, the famous glass peacock of Udaipur's City Palace, complex marble carvings in the Ranakpur Jain temples, an intricately painted Lord Ganesha and puppets among others.

People of Rajasthan

Smorgasbord - thats the only word which comes to my mind!
These pictures were taken at various places in Rajasthan and a collage (of picture postcards) was the only way, I thought, it could have been depicted.
The gentleman twirling his moustache (second from left in last row) apparently has one of the longest moustaches in the world!

For a slide show of complete set of street photographs from Rajasthan, please click here.

Time off

 

Cops take a breather while on duty.

Those were the days

Though the picture was taken only recently (from my 7th floor apartment), it brings back the memories of those days when union strikes were commonplace and workers would nonchalantly play cards outside the factory gate.