India is a place that asks many questions about your personal photographic ability and how you can deal with a major cultural transition. It’s a two tier experience – at once amazing, but twice as emotionally bewildering. There are immediate feelings of awe and trepidation; everything is normal and yet nothing is as you would expect. This is a continent full of contradictions – a society layered by poverty, wealth and its many religions. These are places overburdened by huge cultural divisions and massive population.
Tradition runs thousands of years deep, the distances travelled are vast and the contrasts are both obvious and extreme: simple lives complicated by bureaucracy, a drab day to day existence, an often forlorn grey background illuminated by vibrant colours and a cacophony of noise. Here is an older lifestyle, slowly evolving, struggling to embrace modern more western ways without loosing its identity, relatively un-changed, yet constantly moving, hectic but somehow passive. Life here is often about simply being, not having.