from Photographers Blog:
Rushdie, Oprah and disappointment
By Altaf Bhat
When I set off from Delhi to cover the Jaipur Literature Festival (my first art beat assignment) I was full of enthusiasm as controversial British-Indian author Salman Rushdie was expected to participate in the event. I had planned a sequence of photographs on the growing "Lit Fest" but all my planning turned out to be the proverbial "castle in the air".
The festival's invitation to Rushdie, whose 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" is banned in India, sparked protests from some Muslim groups who said he had offended their religious sentiments. Rushdie made headlines in Indian media much before his arrival in the country. Muslim organizations in Jaipur threatened to hold protests if Rushdie was allowed into the country, and permitted to speak at the festival. The author and the organizers of the event maintained that Rushdie would participate.
The situation was shaping into a face-off between the literary circles and the Muslim organization and I was hoping to get a few good pictures. With shoe-throwing becoming the fad form of protest in India – Rahul Gandhi, heir-apparent of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, being the latest victim – I readied myself to get the best shot if Rushdie faced a similar fate during his presence at the event.
from Photographers Blog:
License to kill
By Danish Siddiqui
Mumbai provides everyone living in it with an opportunity to earn and survive. Be it a white-collared job in a multinational company located in one of the city’s plush high rise buildings or killing rats by night in the filthiest and dirtiest parts of India's financial capital. This time, my tryst was with the latter.
I decided I wanted to meet Mumbai's rat-killer army employed by the city's civic body. Very little is known about this tireless force that works the bylanes of the metropolis every night. Mumbai's municipal corporation employs 44 rat killers and also has a freelance contingent, who aspire to be on the payrolls one day. Employees of the pest control department receive a salary of 15,000 to 17,000 Indian Rupees ($294 to 333) while contract laborers are paid 5 Indian rupees ($0.10) per rat they kill. The rat killers are expected to kill at least 30 rodents per night and hand over the carcasses to civic officials in the morning. If they fall short by even one rodent, they are expected to make it up the next night or else they stand to lose a day’s pay.
Importing Ukraine stray dogs above the existing Indian stray dogs is a great idea of the economist of India. I am sure Ukraine would be too happy to export its stray dogs.
Why not send a proposal to the Indian government for a quick action on this brilliant break through idea of importing Ukraine dogs to kill Indian rats?
from Photographers Blog:
Circus nostalgia
By Vivek Prakash
There are a couple of stories I've been waiting to do since I heard that I'd be moving to India last year. Maybe it's part nostalgia, part fascination, but I'm happy to be able to interpret these stories visually, finally.
The last time I was at a circus was some twenty-five years ago. My father brought me to the Bandra Reclamation in Mumbai to see it. I can't remember which one it was, maybe the Apollo Circus? I remember the smell of fresh dirt and popcorn. There were fireworks. There was a dome where three people on motorbikes rode on the walls without crashing into each other. There were big cats; lions and tigers with some jumping through flaming hoops. I was wide-eyed and thrilled. I've dreamed of seeing and photographing that show for years.
Twenty-five years later, I came to the very same location, with a camera in hand. When the Rambo Circus pitched tent, I jumped at the chance to spend a few days documenting what Indian circuses are like. This place has been in my imagination for so long.
from Photographers Blog:
Jostling for space in Mumbai
By Danish Siddiqui
To live in the world’s second most populous country and city is itself an experience. When I was asked to do a feature story on the world's population crossing the 7 billion mark, I realized it wasn’t going to be an easy task. This was simply because there were so many stories to tell in this city of dreams, Mumbai.
I chose to do a story on the living conditions of Mumbai’s migrant population who pour in to the city by the hour.
I decided to go to a slum which is inhabited mostly by migrants arriving from the northern part of India in search of a better future. Most of the migrants who live there work as taxi drivers and manual laborers. It was difficult to get access as they were always apprehensive of journalists. But I was able to convince a couple of them over a cup of tea after which they opened the doors of their one room world to me.
This same one room tenement acts as their bathroom, kitchen and living room. The one room is shared by at least 5 to 20 people who share the space, rent and other expenses.
Is India becoming too big to govern?
The population growth in India has outgrown everything else, even perhaps corruption. It is the country with the highest population density in the list of top 10 countries with highest population and with largest land. Only one country with higher population density and in any one of the two largest/highest list is its neighbor, Bangladesh. Bangladesh is in top 10 highest population list. No wonder illegal Bangladesh immigration is a major headache in India.
To commensurate this wonderful population growth story, Indian political growth is apologetically moribund. The number of seats in people’s parliament have increased from 489 to 543. To compare with population growth, since 1951 the population of the country has increased from 361.1 millions to 1028.7 millions. All the political growth has been horizontally, and not vertically……
The sad part is that number of seats in Indian parliament have been freeze till the year 2026……………………
from Photographers Blog:
A village of eternal bachelors
By Vivek Prakash
With the world's population set to hit 7 billion on October 31, photographers in India have been on the move to tell stories that talk about what those numbers really mean in a country as large as India - with 1.2 billion people and counting, this is supposed to be the world's largest democracy.
When you take a closer look at the statistics, you find some surprising and scary figures - the ratio of female children to males born actually declined here over the last 10 years - from 933 females for every thousand males in the 2001 census, to just 914 in 2011. The combination of cheap portable ultrasound technology and a decades-old preference for male babies -- who are seen as breadwinners -- has enabled sex-selective abortions and made worse female infanticide. In a place as wide and as vast as India, these are things that are hard to control, no matter how illegal.
We had been trying to find ways to illustrate this for some time without much success - getting access to tell this story had been taking some time. Late last month, a story about a small village in Gujarat was brought to my attention.
Journalists from the Thomson Reuters Foundation had visited Siyani, a small rural town of just 8,000 people (tiny by Indian standards) - where the social effect of such a low ratio of women meant that men were having a tough time finding brides. I set out to remote Gujarat to try and interpret this story with my camera.
Thanks MadonnaDevotta, It’s been corrected now.
Cheers,
Corinne Perkins
from Photographers Blog:
City of joy
By Rupak de Chowdhuri
It’s festive time in Kolkata, with the Durga festival celebrated across the city, before Diwali celebrations fill the city with light. Kolkata has been called the "City of Joy," a title which was immortalized in a book by Dominique Lapierre. It tells the story of the poorest of the poor who still somehow find hope and joy in life. Little did I know I was about to come face-to-face with such a story.
I hunt for pictures every day. One day, I was looking for pictures when an old friend told me to go to a place where I was guaranteed to find a good story. Because of my curious nature, I started to walk in search of the story I’d been told about in the middle of Kolkata. I started searching among the food stalls because I wouldn’t believe it until I saw them myself.
At last I found them. And I stood stunned, like other customers in front of the food stall. I watched for half an hour.
The next day I came back and started talking to other people at the food stall. The other workers said they were a happy family once. They lived nearby for forty years. A few years ago, they moved to a village about 45 minutes away by train. I went home but I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I didn’t sleep at all that night.
Tears dont help but did not realise that they flow sometimes unknowingly !
from Photographers Blog:
Born free
By Adnan Abidi
The joy of being born in a free country is a gift I received from those who sweat and bled in the struggle for Indian Independence. I accept the fact that I do very little to appreciate that gift. The most I do is fly a kite on August 15th, like many others. Quite a few of my fellow 'post-independence born' countrymen have little clue about the struggles our martyrs undertook to achieve what, today, we enjoy with much ingratitude. Freedom has been taken for granted.
The first struggle of Indian Independence was unknown to me, the second, as popular support named it, was the one I witnessed. It was when a 74-year-old Gandhinian, Anna, mobilized a crowd of over a million to crusade against corruption they say has infiltrated to the very roots of the Indian administration.
It was a much-watched movement that kept most of the country glued to their televisions for thirteen days. The media became a window for the 1.21 billion population. And I, as part of that window, got a chance to hold up Anna Hazare's campaign to the world. The call against corruption came on the same day that India achieved its independence back in 1947, and in the same month as Ramadan, which fell in August this year. Following tradition, I was celebrating my independence by flying a kite when I received two calls -- one from a fellow colleague, who informed me that Anna Hazare was praying at Rajghat, and the second from my Amma (mother), who asked me to get dates and fruits, traditionally eaten to end the day’s fast. I was at a crossroads and I had to choose my path.
Handing over the kite's string to my friend I rushed home, picked up my gear and headed to Rajghat, forgetting about the dates I was asked to bring. Mahatma Gandhi's memorial isn't a place I often visit unless on an assignment. So it was that day, when yet again I realized I was one of the last photographers to reach. I shot many frames from all possible angles.
Generations before me had witnessed the power of Indian media as it was instrumental in bringing about the required change. What follows is one such example.
the pictures taken are really beautiful!!! they capture the feel of each situation!!! and beautiful write up too!!!
from Photographers Blog:
Barefoot in a recycled school
The environment hasn't been spared in India's headlong rush towards development and consumerism. With it came mounds of garbage, piles of waste that had nowhere to go, industrial pollutants that were fed straight back into the rivers and lakes that supply drinking water to millions. Walking around the streets of any town in India, you don't get the feeling that care for the environment is on the top of anyone's list of priorities.
So it was with a little skepticism that I read about a school which claimed to be completely environmentally friendly. I made a plan to travel to Pune, about 190km (118 miles) from Mumbai, to take a look at the Aman Setu school, which means "bridge to peace". They claimed fantastic things - the buildings were environmentally friendly made entirely out of recycled and natural bits and pieces - they had their own vegetable garden for children - kids were allowed to run around barefoot.
What I found really was surprising. The "school" consisted of just a handful of buildings. Madhavi Kapur, who came up with the idea for the school, told me how they'd made the buildings - they'd taken old cement bags, commonly left over at many construction sites after buildings are made in India, and compacted them together with mud to make the rooms. One of the buildings was cone-shaped, others rectangular. Roofs were made out of old advertisement claddings. Ventilation was provided through disused plastic pipes. Instead of using toxic paints and whitewashes, they used a mixture of cow dung, mud and water. I was told it's been traditionally used in India for centuries because strangely enough, a mixture of cow dung and water insect proofs buildings. Who would have thought?!? It smelled reasonably pleasant too, you wouldn't think you were standing somewhere were the floors and walls were plastered in cow dung.
There were rough windows cut into the walls. No lights or fans, just natural light streaming into the rooms, the sound of wind rustling the trees outside. The children seemed to love it. Why wouldn't they? The classrooms were rustic but nice. If they got bored of studying maths or whatever, they could just leave the class, run around in the grass for a while, feed fish in the local pond, or do whatever they want and then come back in. A teacher told us they wanted the kids "to be one with the surroundings" to give them a sense of responsibility, and also to release energy - when they do come back to studying multiplication tables, they're docile.
They'd thought of everything - they bought an old municipal transport bus and stripped it down to make it kid safe. They installed a blackboard and it doubles as a classroom and a play space, where the boys can go and dangle from the handlebars on the roof.
The children get to run around barefoot on the grass anytime they want, play in a garden on recycled car tires, hang out by a pond - all with no teachers screaming at anyone. Surprisingly, the children are attentive and obedient in class, and for all of the running around, it's got to be the quietest school yard I've been in. There's no bells to announce classes, just the teacher saying "we're done for now".
Nice pix Vivek! Always liked happy stories as opposed to disaster ones! Keep up the good work!
from Photographers Blog:
Fight for a frame
The digital revolution has its pros and cons; on one hand it has amplified the chance of getting a picture in a stampede-like situation and on the other, it has created the stampede-like situation. With the advent of digital technology, the number of publications and media houses has grown, in turn multiplying the number of cameramen and photographers present at an event. Yet it has also increased the number of picture possibilities which in the celluloid days were limited to 36 frames in a film roll. Good or bad there is no going back.
Ignoring my aching jaw, I scrolled through my images to see if I had got the picture, of India's former telecommunications minister Andimuthu Raja, accused in the 2G spectrum scam. It must have been an elbow of one of the many cameramen or photographers present who were struggling to get the same picture that struck me. I didn’t mind the pain as even my elbow hurt a bit. I was sure I wasn't the only one with a sore jaw, of late we photographers were accustomed to it.
Court assignments as we call them, isn’t an assignment a photographer is keen on doing. But it has become mandatory as the picture compliments the newspaper headlines - lately they were related to the 2G Spectrum scam, a $39.16 billion scam that shook the nation. One after another the suspects have been zeroed in as the Indian judiciary tightens the noose on everyone involved. Every now and then someone is produced in court and we photographers find ourselves in the similar stampede-like situations.
Since December Reuters has covered a number of these types of events- be it a courthouse or the Central Bureau of Investigation headquarters.
I remember one occasion when Raja was to be brought to the Patiala House court. I didn’t count but at least one photographer and at least three TV cameramen were present from each electronic media house. Unplanned events like this one become very chaotic, as hordes of photographers jump into a narrow area to get first a good picture, second a usable one - the latter is mandatory. As Raja climbed down from a government vehicle he was surrounded by photographers. I struggled as I made my way with my wide-angle lens and landed in front of him. I was lucky to reach there as my counterparts from other organizations were shooting blindly, I didn’t take my hand off the shutter release, and shot hundreds of frames, 6 or 8 of them were usable and one I consider good.
from Photographers Blog:
Editing thousands of cricket pictures a day
Sports and Action photography is all about timing. It’s about reacting. It’s about being in the right place at the right time and it’s about execution.
These are all qualities of the athlete and those of the photographer covering them as well. Each sport has predictable and unpredictable moments. For instance, in cricket, photographers will have opportunities to capture jump shots, players diving to make the crease, diving to take a catch, diving to field the ball, a bowler leaping in the air as he bowls, a batsman screaming in joy on reaching his century, etc. Understanding the timing of these predictable actions allows a photographer to capture the peak moment; when the action is most dramatic.
Before I start editing I always have a brief chat with the photographers about what could be the day’s great picture. The staff never fail to deliver and meet expectations. I briefed two photographers covering matches from the quarter-finals onwards not to forget to look for emotion in the players and the fans. A good number of the best shots come from the crowd. I received a bunch of nice pictures of the crowd from the final.
While editing pictures from the semi-final match between arch rivals India and Pakistan, I thought I should leave the confines of our New Delhi desk and photograph the match in Mohali. The Mohali semi-final match had a few news angles attached to it. Firstly, India and Pakistan were playing each other after a long time; secondly the Indian Prime Minister and his Pakistan counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani were watching the match in the stands after the latter accepted an invite from Manmohan Singh to watch the match. It was a historic moment where one could see the prime ministers of two nuclear-armed countries sitting side-by-side enjoying the game. But in the end, I am glad I edited their pictures.
Great images, pretty much my dream job – the photography rather than the editing 
Any pointers for my portfolio would be very welcome.
