No particular intention had brought me a Murshidabad District in Bengal, I might search my excuses and I can fabricate several. Making some pictures for a friends mother's NGO perhaps, a made-up magazine assignment etc. The simple matter is that I had decided one morning to leave and gets on a plane and then a car and reach there that very night. I had it in mind to travel around for two weeks and then go back.

 What was I looking for. I don't know myself. Looking back at myself through time, I have partly become a stranger to myself, feeling things utterly lost to me now. And yet I can explain him better than my present self, I was buried under my skin. My life was unfocused and directionless, I still had not made a home for myself after several half hearted efforts. All my belongings then were divided between an un-used flat in Bangalore and I spent months wandering around from one spare room in my parents house to another, mostly in Delhi. It had begun to feel as if I had never lived in any other way, nor will I ever settle down. It seemed that I couldn't seem to connect properly with the world. I felt this not as a failure of the world but as a massive failing in myself, I would have liked to change it but I didn't know how. In my clearest moments I had thought that I had lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that I was. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much. It wasn't a good place to be if you're a observer of the world, a photographer if you must insult me.

 In this state travel isn’t celebration but a kind of mourning, a way of dissipating yourself. So I move around from one place to another, not driven by curiosity but by the bored anguish of staying still. I spends a few days in riding pillion on a borrowed motorcycle - from village to village taking pictures of village women stitching kantas for a calendar. It was a simple village,I couldn't produce the necessary awe to the simplicity of such a life. Even early in the day the air is heavy and humid, green leaves burn with a brilliant glow, perhaps the pictures are just better then words.

-Village Scene, Murshidabad