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Indian Experience | Santhosh Chandran
Indian expatriate photographer Shiraz Sithara is planning to exhibit select photographs that he shot to capture rural and urban life of India and Nepal.
After visiting Kolkata, once the captial of British India and commercial, cultural, and educational hub of eastern parts of the country, and isolated villages in Himalayan ranges in Nepal, he said that even though there were differences in backdrop, the life of people who struggle for survival is almost the same everywhere in the world.
The images Sithara captured in the Indian states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and the small villages in Himalayan valleys in Nepal lend credibility to his statement.
Sithara, who always focuses his camera on the life of people more than historical monuments or other tourist highlights during trips deep into the villages of India, said that advertisements have turned many tourist spots in India into a sort of commodity to attract tourists.
“But while closely watching”, Sithara said, “the real life of people is always behind these tourist spots.
Obviously, these frames may depict an unpleasant story but it is a fact or that is the only fact about life.
Even if the city of Kolkata may have a glorious past reflected in its monuments, the life of people behind these is something different,” Sithara said.
The series of photographs Sithara plans to exhibit in Doha before a wider audience, is expected to attract photography enthusiasts as well as the general public.
Describing the story behind each photograph, Sithara said, “I could narrate a long story behind each of my photographs.
As a photographer, I value nothing more than the life that people live, their hard work and their struggle for survival.” The photograph of a woman working in the workshop of a blacksmith the very next day of her marriage and a photo of women looking through the window of an old threestoried building- both clicked in Nepal, unveils the life of two women living in two different worlds.
His other clicks - a family performing the last rites of a relative in a Kerala village, farmer engaged in paddy cultivation in a Nepali village, highlight the contradictions of life – if one is about death, the other is about the struggle for survival.
As every creative photographer, Sithara always prefers to capture the images at dawn, when the long rays of the sun make everything beautiful with light and shade.
“In my journeys, I will always wake up as early as possible as the early sun offers golden opportunities for a photographer.
One of the shots taken on the way to Kathmandu, in Nepal, of an old man and his sheep on a village road, has the beauty of an oil painting.
Sithara wishes to travel widely in India and has also planned to organise a photography exhibition in India, involving like-minded freelance photographers.
Active in many photography workshops in Doha, Sithara has formed an organisation for the children who are interested in the art of photography.
Including the prestigious Katara Photography Award, Sithara has won many awards.
His special photography column in an Indian language newspaper in Qatar has a large number of readers.
Sithara works as a photographer with the Ministry of Justice and hails from Payyoli, a township in Kozhikode in Kerala, in India.
