India is a crazy place – chaos, noise, colors, over-stimulation of all your senses at all times. Except those rare snatches of calm. Those moments of serenity. Those deep breaths and gentle smiles. Sometimes that’s what religion is. A visit to the temple to touch the feet of a goddess in contemplation. Hanging your sari…
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Look up in the sky. There you see them. Black and white and brown and grey. Flying in circles over your head. Following each other and the wave of a white cloth on a distant rooftop. Pigeons – no longer the dirty vermin of the sky, but majestic kings of the clouds. Pigeon keeping is…
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The gentle bumping and the melodic honking of the overnight bus from Ahmedabad to Bhuj lulled me into such a deep sleep that I didn’t wake up until Mandvi, almost 2 hours later, which was a nice coincidence since I had planned to go there anyways…eventually. A quick walk around the coastal boat-building town reveled…
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On the outskirts of Lucknow, roaming the streets, lost as we could be – then booooooom! Crazy colorful wedding band carts and a slice of dark, curious eyes.
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I’m not quite sure what attracts me so much to streetside barbers. Maybe it’s that they epitomize the lack of division between public and private in urban India – where something as intimate as shaving can be done out in the open for everyone to see. Maybe it’s their simplicity – just a stack…
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Magic |ˈmajik| noun : a quality that makes something seem removed from everyday life, esp. in a way that gives delight chaos |ˈkāˌäs| noun : complete disorder and confusion If you look hard enough (or maybe exactly when you stop looking), Delhi’s chaos turns into magic and the city becomes enchanted with djinns, palaces, mysterious incantations, spicy potions, and bikes made out of balloons (for…
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It’s my favorite thing to do: roam streets, pretending to look for something, but actually looking at everything. These are pictures from a guided roam – a walk through Old Delhi organized by my friend Nick and his organization Street Connections. They were taken with a Nikon FE with Kodak Tri-X 400 Film. *These are…
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Once upon a time, my husband and I went for an afternoon stroll through Kotla Mubarkpur and we met: a guy selling streetside snacks, a guy in a magic cave of kitchen supplies, a Muslim mattress seller with all your sleep needs, a smiley rickshaw driver, a shy schoolgirl, and a slightly crazy vegetable seller….
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‘The ideal job,’ Ashraf once said, as if elucidating a complex mathematical function, ‘has the perfect balance of kamai and azadi.’ Through the course of his life, a working man must experiment with as many combinations as he can before discovering the point where these counteracting forces offset each other to arrive at a solitary…
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Wander and Wonder