Earlier this month, World Vision India sent me to Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, India to document problems being faced by HIV positive people in the wake of a severe shortage of Antiretroviral drugs. This work will be part of Ek Nazar, a group exhibition where I share space with with Srinivas Kuruganti and Mark Antony, on the occasion of World AIDS Day in Delhi. The exhibition will later travel to many cities across India.
Photographs made on assignment for Greenpeace India earlier this month.
Twisted blades of a fan inside Qasim Sher Basha’s house in Savitri Nagar, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. The asbestos roof that covered their house had been blown away by the winds that accompanied Cyclone Hudud as it made landfall. Continue reading ›
Samatbhai Jivabhai Bharawad (18) of the Maldhari community grazes his buffaloes at a proposed site for a Maruti Suzuki automobile plant near Hansalpur, about 110km from Ahmedabad in Gujarat. The Maldharis, who are nomadic herdmen, along with farmers from the region, have been opposing the plant on grounds that it is coming up on fertile farm and pastoral lands.
Why Gujarat farmers are opposing Maruti plant.
Hansalpur, the Singur in making in Modi’s Gujarat.
Shot on assignment for Capital magazine, Germany in March 2014.
Looking for a quick cup of chai after a walk around the Yousufain Dargah in Hyderabad’s Nampally locality, I spotted a brightly painted cafe occupying a part of an old building adjacent to the dargah. As I walked in, wondering if they also served Irani chai at what looked more like a small restaurant, I almost missed the group of men sitting on their haunches by the door. The sight was intriguing, for many of the men seemed to be dressed reasonably well to be beggars and their backs against the road confirmed they were not daily labourers either. Continue reading ›
BMW cars being sold from a tent? Capital, Germany’s oldest business publication, had commissioned me in September to shoot photographs for a story on German companies adapting innovative marketing strategies in India. When the brief came in, I found among other things, a BMW showroom in a tent in Rajkot, Gujarat. I went there imagining a typical red and blue patterned desi shamiana with people standing in a queue to buy cars.
What I found was quite the opposite. The mobile showroom was a swanky tent on the lawns of a hotel, complete with wooden flooring, air-conditioning and uniformed waiters offering water to potential customers. Rajkot, I was told, is an affluent town with a taste for expensive cars but the bosses at BMW thought it wasn’t a bright idea to open a showroom in Rajkot when there is one 220km away in Ahmedabad. The mobile showroom comes to Rajkot at fixed intervals, usually for a period of fifteen days and once a booking is made, cars are brought in from Ahmedabad for delivery.
