It was winter vacations for my daughter, when in 2013 she wanted to experiment with photography, and I had to identify a school for her to learn formally. India’s celebrity photographer Raghu Rai’s school of photography was just a quarter of an hour drive away from our home in Gurgaon, in the nearby village of Baliawas. The then year old center promised a world of learning, in creative photography. I considered myself lucky to be able to get such an opportunity of learning from the best in town.
Three decades of living out of suitcase for bread and butter, in India and across the globe, had left me with more butter in my belly, a whole lot of memories, many stories and more lost opportunities to shoot good photos. Motivated by the plausible opportunities to shoot, and largely the urge to learn for the sake of learning, I enrolled with Raghu Rai Center for photography.
Over the years, though, the number of clicks are no match against the number of kilometers that we have clocked driving across the country. We have lived a better part of my life in Gurgaon, south of New Delhi, India. Kerala in south of India has been my second home for a long time. So driving from the hills of Uttarakhand or Himachal Pradesh to the southern most corners of India along the west coast or in and around the Thar Desert of Rajasthan has been a charm of a lifetime.
We were on this trip to Rajasthan in 2014 from Ahmedabad with two senior photographers from Kolkata, and a friend of mine. As the sun was about to set across the border, I stopped the car to shoot some photos of the undulating sand dunes. One of the senior photographers during that trip pronounced his judgement about me – “he is not a photographer” – only to supplement his statement later with “he likes to drive”.
Between me and my wife Sujatha – we have driven a humble 250.000 + kilometers in India since 2000 – we love this country and the people.
My source of bread and butter continues to be information technology industry. Since the market crash of 2008, photography and travel is what I spend most of my energies on and hope to continue doing so.
This blog is an attempt to share some of those experiences.