It’s been two months since we returned from India and the last five weeks or more have seen very little of the multiple photos that I took. I suppose what sparked my interest on Thursday, 12 February 2015 was a chat I had was a local/South African Indian businessman who was off to Dubai and Malaysia. I asked him if he had ever been to India and was sure I knew the answer before he gave it. He replied in the negative confirming my suspicions.
I asked him why he had never visited India, the country of his roots, and he told me what a number of other local persons have told me “It is very dirty and poverty stricken isn’t it?” Once again I went to great lengths to explain all sides of the coin as I know best from having visited India on three occasions during the past six years or so.
The first photo that caught my eye, one I have previously presented, was taken at night in Colaba outside Leopold Café. I named this photo “Blue Nights”. In this photo a mother or perhaps grandmother is seen holding a young child and asking for money.
On two occasions whilst walking on the streets during the day, we were approached by a mother with a young child who pointed at a nearby store and tried to convince us that she did not want money but baby food from the store. She followed us into the store and the shop owner even confirmed her story to be true.
We suspected that this was a ploy to relieve us of our money, a portion of which would be returned to the mother once we left the shop and the shop owner would keep his cut. Of course our suspicions could be very wrong.
The second photo that grabbed my attention the next evening was taken early morning shortly after sunrise on the side of a canal on the Kerala Backwaters.
The green rice fields of prominent in the photo and the large long backwater canal is out of the picture, raised a metre or two above the rice field, to the left.
The two photographs are collectively called “Two Faces of India”, but should perhaps be called two of many faces of India.
Andrew Harvard Photography 