Skip to main content

Posts

HUNGRY REPUBLIC OF INDIA

As booming India goes crazy over slimming centres, weight loss gadgets and obesity-curing wonders ... the future of the country stays hungry and malnourished, helplessly looking at the present for help as it dies everyday... One-year-old Harinder, who is suffering from severe malnutrition cries in his mother's lap.  © Danish Siddiqui Foundation Finally, I get down to updating my blog, which has been lying stale for a few weeks now…This is a very special story to me… A few weeks back I packed my bags again and traveled into the interiors of the country with my Chief Photographer Reinhard Krause. The intention was to look for stories that stay neglected by the media; stories that don’t get the ‘numbers’ because the audiences responsible for the latter, are too busy with their own lives to bother about such matters. These stories, however, give me the strength and confidence to pursue many more such subjects relentlessly. For our latest excursion, Reinhard and I traveled to rem
Recent posts

An EYE for an EYE

Mahatma Gandhi famously said: "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind". But even he'd be proud to note that that may not be the case always ... like in Madurai . In this temple town, the eyes of a few good people are giving vision to those who have been deprived from seeing the beautiful colors of the world. An organization called Aravind Eye Care System (which I am sure most would'nt have heard of) has been providing free eye care to the poor in rural India where otherwise even basic medical facilities are hard to come by. Headquartered in Madurai , the Aravind Hospital draws visitors from all over the state of Tamil Nadu. With the support of its benefactors, it has treated 29 million patients so far.   It is a less-known statistic but India is home to 25% of the world’s blind. Every year at least 4 million Indians develop cataract that is a major cause for blindness                                                      Efforts of organizations

India's very own 'AVATAR'

Last week I travelled to a remote place in India called Lanjigarh, which is located in the state of Orissa. It was a trip I'd been looking forward to for a few months. I am sure you'd have heard/read of how mining, sometimes illegal, is destroying the remaining forest cover in India and displacing tribal communities living in these forests for hundreds of years. This is a story of one such primitive tribe called the Dongria Kondh that lives in Orissa's Niyamgiri Mountains , which are part of India ’s Eastern Ghats range. These tribals have been fighting a nine-year long battle for survival against British mining giant Vedanta Resources, incidentally owned by an NRI (non-resident Indian). The story is simple yet complicated. Vedanta wants to mine the bauxite (raw material for making aluminium) in the Niyamgiri Mountains , which are worshipped as God by 8,000+ tribals that reside here and have never known any other home. These tribals, like any of us, cannot all

Humanity floods Ganga

That day was finally here. After reading about it in the papers and watching images of it on television since childhood, I was there myself. It was the start of the Maha Kumbh Mela. A unique congregation of humanity had converged on the holy city of Haridwar. As I stepped into the town, I could already sense the special status given to it in Hindu mythology. Right from the railway station to the Ghats, there was only one color...orange. On the Ghats, one thing that I saw immediately and which didn’t surprise me at all was the image of a mother treating her children equally; whether they be rich or poor, fair or dark, boy or girl, Ganga Maiyya (Mother Ganga) had stretched out her arms for all. You know that when you immerse yourself in the waters, it is like crying and seeking comfort in your mother's lap. You want her to forgive you for your sins and she being a mother, she does so without questioning. The Ghats of the Ganga were buzzing w