I hope my photographs will tell the world all that it needs to know about me. My art, my photographs, show you, dear reader, how I see the world - on a quest to capture and hold on to the subtle beauty in our most mundane moments. Like there lies an infinite possibility of real and imaginary numbers between any two integers, there are an infinite number of incomplete frames between two picturesque moments. Maybe it is the job of an artist to find a way to capture the soul of these imperfect moments which make up most of the lived human experience. Our third world realities are hardly ever as absolute as they are made out to be by their first world interpretors. Even in the most abject poverty human beings still find moments of joy, dignity and hope to hold on to. What is more striking than the extent of human suffering, is the essentially human resilience that looks it in the eye and dares to live. The more places I go, the more people I meet, this resilience, this quiet joy that underlines the human condition is what seems to me to hold us all together, no matter what differences of language, culture, race and religion divide us. This is the inner light that sometimes shines through people’s faces and lights up my frames. I am humbled and grateful to these people for sharing their lives with me, it is an honour that I will cherish throughout my lifetime. 

My first encounter with this unflinching resilience was through growing up in the suburbs of the 24 Parganas of West Bengal, India, where the shadows of the partition still lurked in the lives of the second and third generations of families who had lost everything in that great tragedy. My fascination with technology began quite early on as studying science in school fed my curiosity and the tirade of technological advances that punctuated our childhood led us through one upheaval after another. An early passion for sketching and painting gave way to a keen interest in photographs and an intimate relationship with the camera while I was in high school. I moved to the big bustling city of Calcutta to attend University where I studied engineering in Jute and Fibre Technology. My studies brought me close to the floundering Jute industry of West Bengal and introduced me with the thousands of workers whose lives depended on it, this was my second encounter with the great spirit of human resilience. At the same time I found myself drawn to the grand arena of the students movement, in which I felt the pulsating aspiration of the multitudes to fight the circumstances of their poverty in order to build a better future for themselves. I remained deeply involved with the movement for a long ten years, getting to know people from all walks of life, travelling widely and meeting families from the most marginalised localities and communities of our country. In the meantime I completed a postgraduation in Textile technology, and my years of engineering training forced me to consider the most efficient ways to tell the stories of the extraordinary lives  of these ordinary people of our land. My central work at that point was the leadership of the students’ organisation’s journal and website, and this work made me feel more acutely than ever that the stories that had been handed down by our human forefathers were resoundingly the stories of the stronger and the more privileged. I realised that the widening availability of information and technology gave us, the children of common women and men, the opportunity to change the narrative by telling the world the stories of the voiceless and nameless multitudes. I found myself in a unique position to embark on this work, given the ease with which I could now walk amongst the common people of our land, and my ease and passion for the camera which gave me the power to communicate their experiences in a way even words often fell short of. So, in short, this is how the journey began, I have come a little way, and there is still long to go before I sleep. While the pandemic locked us into ourselves, keeping me away from the subject of all these musings all together, it also gave time to incubate some ideas which I have just started to bring into life. I now live a life across two continents, based partly in London and partly in Kolkata, travelling the length and breadth of India in search of the contradictions that make a perfect photograph.  Thank you for embarking on this journey with me for a while, I hope this is experience stays with you in some way, that will be its own reward for me.


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