I have been very fortunate to have been schooled in India, Europe and the U.S., with more years of my life spent living outside than in India. I grew up there, through my teen years, but my most formative moments have come not from any one country but from a 'progressive juxtapositioning' of concepts and belief systems against a backdrop of different cultures that I have experienced. My world-view stems from a true amalgamation, a blending of things that made (and continue to make) 'sense' to me -- be it in something as innocuous as my greeting to a stranger on the street to something as personal as why was my marriage was a 'love marriage' as opposed to an 'arranged' one as is the norm in India! My regular visits to my parents in India have repeatedly thrust me center-stage into a society that senses me as a 'local guy' - in as much as I 'walk the walk' and 'talk the talk', however, my 'view' of the India I visit is not entirely from within but from the outside as well -- I am constantly switching back-and-forth between contrasting cultures in my own mind even as I blend seamlessly and almost anonymously with the multitudes on the street and in the bazaars. Studying my photographs and the content and manner in which I composed them, reveals much to me about myself, and about where I am in this unending yearning for a clear(er) definition of the self, of myself. Just like the way in which the 'act of writing' forces a writer to think through 'the cobwebs of ambiguity' in his/her mind and 'pen down' thoughts clearly and forcefully; similarily photography for me forces my mind to 'take a stance, a position' which in turn helps me discover where I am and where I have been and also offers just a glimpse of where I seem headed to. There are times when I recognize my roots in India, yet there are also times when I feel 'a homeless of sorts' -- and the whole key for me has been to grow to a point where a 'home' is what I make of the place that I am in, to 'bloom where planted' and to recognize that we all have two families that deserve equal attention -- one that we are brought into this world in and the other being the people we are surrounded by - in the community, the workplace, the Little League, the YMCA!
A word about photographing in India. One of my heroes (photographically speaking) has been Steve McCurry (famed for his work covering Asia and the Far East for National Geographic and author of a stunning book simply titled - 'Portraits'). Steve once commented on his experiences photographing India for over a decade and he summed it very thoughtfully; he said - "In the West everone is very private about everything and very few things are sacred. In India, nobody has much privacy, and everything is sacred!". My own thoughts and photographs echo Steve's viewpoint but I do have a bit to add to his sensibility. I have often mused about why photographing in India seems so much more colorful, pungent, noisy, vibrant, hopeful and tragic at the same time as compared to the West. The best I have been able to come up with is by thinking of the two worlds as 'two lovers' - in the West, the lovers are waltzing, mindful of the personal space and nuances that somehow mean sophistication for some, whereas in India - the two lovers are in the act of eloping, frenzied with life, dancing not simply holding hands as in a poised waltz, but 'clutching'. These photographs, to me, mean it is this 'clutching' that I must do more of -- so I can feel each moment of this 'certain wild and precious life'! Namaste!