India is serenity, beauty, calmness. India is noise, pollution, crowds. India is irony, humor, drama. India is sharp contrasts, extreme wealth and extreme poverty.
India is a billion people and you get to see many facets of their lives in Clive Limpkin’s book,’India Exposed: The Subcontinent A-Z’ (Abbeyville Press)
How many Indias are there?
As many as the eyes that perceive it.
Each visitor sees a different India, bringing in their own experiences to the encounter. British photographer Clive Limpkin has a lively new book ‘India Exposed: the Sub-Continent A-Z’ which shows the results of his brush with India. His camera, however, returns time and again to what really moves him: the human connection. As he writes: “When friends ask for one good reason to visit, I offer them a billion – it’s the people.”
When the writer Gita Mehta was growing up in Orissa, a small ancient image of Ganesha was unearthed in a mound of dirt as the foundations of their family home were being laid. “I’ve always kept the Ganesha which came out of my parents’ home,” confided Mehta when I interviewed her once in New York. “That is the one image that goes with me wherever I go. He came out of the Indian soil so to me he’s like an umbilical cord that connects me to India. So it doesn’t matter where I live – he is my India.”
Yes, all the high drama, the tall tales of tall cities like Bombay and New York started on a narrow balcony on a narrow street in Bada Bazaar in an old and densely packed part of Calcutta.
In recent days Dr. Abraham Verghese has been boarding jets at breakneck speed, shuttling between countless cities and towns in North America, not for medical conferences or research but for that quintessential ritual of an author’s life – the book tour…
She has put into words what millions of immigrants would find hard to articulate, especially the dilemmas faced by women who move from the confines and traditions of home into the brave new universe outside.
Listening to my old tape, I found there were intriguing glimpses of what moves both mother and daughter and the perspectives on the world they share, the values that help them create these very real, very imaginary worlds.
‘Midnight’s Children’ freed other young emerging Indian writers to be bold and unleash the Story Waters and be accepted on their own terms by the west.
With deft, intricate brush-strokes Jhumpa Lahiri creates characters that are so real you could swear you recognize them, you know them, or at least people like them.
To look at his resume is to wonder if it’s the resume of just one man – or several!
