TOM PIETRASIK | Photographer

At the beginning of the year, while eating breakfast one morning in Ranchi, the capital of India’s Jharkhand state, I picked up a copy of the Hindustan Times newspaper. At the top of the front page, under a headline that read, “New Year’s gift for Bokaro: Second steel plant”, correspondent Sanjay Sahay wrote,

“Bokaro is a city, where a majority of the population, either directly or indirectly, depends on the Bokaro Steel Plant (BSL) for a living. Not surprising then that union Steel Minister Virbhadra Singh’s announcement on Friday that they would consider setting up a second steel plant in the city inspired a lot of enthusiasm and hope.”

As chance would have it, I visited Bokaro the day before Sahay’s article was published. I was there to photograph those living and working around the Tata open-cast coal mine that neighbours the steel plant mentioned in his report. According to Sahay then, I should have come across a lot of enthusiasm and hope among this population who either directly or indirectly [depend] on the Bokaro Steel Plant for a living.

But I didn’t. Instead I was confronted by a poor and dejected community, eking out a living on the fringes of a mine that employes few local residents. I saw women collecting coal as lumps of it toppled from the huge trucks exiting the mines. Close by, families living in grotty hovels, were selling plastic bottles of petrol to passing motor vehicles. This was trickle down economics at work, honouring those who’ve been forced to sacrifice their land in the name of growth.

Sipping my morning tea and persevering with Sahay’s article, I glanced across to the sidebar that ran alongside his words. Beneath the lofty headline, “DEVELOPMENT KNOCKS ON BOKARO’S DOOR”, was a list of planned local education and health initiatives. Upon closer inspection it was apparent that there was no substance to any of these projects. The Hindustan Times had simply regurgitated aspirations that the Government “… would seriously consider starting a medical college in Bokaro” or “SAIL (a steel company) would take a decision on establishing another degree college here.”

When I mentioned the Hindustan Times article to Xavier Dias of BIRSA, an indigenous people’s group, a couple of days later, his rather bleak response was that, “The extraction of minerals is a guarantee that an area will never be developed.” The tragedy is that Jharkhand desperately needs development. With only a quarter of indigenous Adivasi women able to read and an annual per capita income of just $330, there is every need for investment in local communities.

For those that pull the strings of power however, talk of development is simply a means to an end. Health and education projects matter only to the extent that mentioning them helps placate the public. Development aspirations are a tool in much the same cynical way that the specter of a Maoist takeover can be used to justify the removal of obstinate communities from their land.

There are plenty of people with a personal interest in sustaining the injustice of mineral extraction in Jharkhand. Some of them are occasionally found out. Like Jharkhand’s former chief minister Madhu Koda who currently resides in jail, charged with laundering $1.2 billion from the granting of mining licenses. Despite evidence of such shocking abuse of power, disingenuous journalists like Sahay perpetuate a myth by presenting mining companies, their industry associates and their friends in government as as benevolent brokers, bestowing largess upon a grateful public.

Abroad too, newspapers sustain this fiction by failing to acknowledge the hopeless conditions forced on people like those I photographed in Bokaro. When Arundhati Roy considers the “genocidal potential” of mining, The Economist newspaper rebuts her by quoting an Indian finance ministry report that declares, “High growth is critical to generate the revenues needed for meeting our social welfare objectives.” This is a cynical and lazy response when the Indian Government’s meagre spending on health and education pales alongside burgeoning revenue.

If the wealth of mineral extraction is funding social welfare spending, The Economist should ask why ordinary rural communities, like those I met in Jharkhand’s Karanpura valley, persist in a six year struggle to keep coal mining companies and thermal power plants from their land. And too why resistance groups like Jharkhand Mines Area Coordination Committee would sooner face imprisonment than capitulate to myths about development. People living in places like the Karanpura valley are not stupid. They have seen their mineral wealth shipped out to benefit others. They understand better than anyone else that local communities must be at the forefront of the decision making process if they are ever to challenge the powerful interests that exploit Jharkhand’s wealth and continue to deny human rights to those who are being forced from their land.

You can see more of my photographs of Jharkhand’s coalfields on my webstite here.

Of course exploitation in mining isn’t confined to India. Markus Bleasdale’s shocking photo essay, “The Rape of a Nation”, documenting how mining has shaped the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is displayed on the Burn website here.

At the very beginning of the year, I saw an inspiring collection photographs from Cuba by by photography partners Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb at New York’s Ricco Maresca gallery. You can view a selection of these photographs on David Alan Harvey’s Burn site here. And Alex and Rebecca talk about their collaboration on their Two Looks blog here.

I am new to the images of Rebecca Norris Webb but I have long admired Alex Webb’s photographs for their ambiguity and sense of mystery. Webb’s attention to colour and composition is fundamental to his work. But for me, most impressive is his ability to capture those moments when elements outside his control converge and lend real resonance to a scene. In Two Looks, Alex and Rebecca identify this notion, describing it as serendipity or the lucky chance.

Of course good fortune falls only upon those photographers who are prepared to wait, to look and to recognise the significance of a moment. Interviewed by the Foto Tapeta website, Webb describes the process involved when he photographs,

“When I am working, then I really have to work… I really have to stay attuned… It is really about walking and feeling the situation. How do you enter the situation? Some situations you get comfortable just walking right in. Others you have to sort of dance around the edge and come in here… What I want to experience is this sudden moment of visual insight.”

And it was a moment of visual insight that clearly struck Webb when two mysterious figures entered this scene in Istanbul which later became the cover for his book, “City of a Hundred Names”.

What makes this kind of photography exciting for me is the notion that these moments happen all the time. As Elliot Erwitt, Webb’s colleague at Magnum Photos, says, “You can find pictures anywhere. It’s simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them.” Of course for the most part, these “pictures” pass the world by because no one was there to capture them. Fate has intervened and occasionally presented pictures to me. Significantly it has always been during those moments when I have been patient and willing to wait, to watch and to identify a moment.

So it was that a man, wearing a green shirt wondered past this scene of a building site in Lucknow while I was working on a story about Chief Minister Mayawati and her Ambedkar Park for the Financial Times Magazine.

Fate had a part to play when the elements of the picture above unfolded before me and it was only last week that I noticed the Varanasi tea-lady pictured at the top of this post adopting a posture that perfectly mirrored the statue of a deity standing above her. You can see more of my recent photographs of Varanasi, including the picture below, on my website here.

Northern India has been suffering unprecedented fog over the past couple of weeks. I had to contend with the frustration of air-traffic delays while stuck at Delhi airport for six hours last Friday waiting for visibility to improve sufficiently to allow my Mumbai-bound flight to take off. And peering through the doom and gloom of India’s Republic Day parade on Tuesday, you’d have been forgiven for wondering if the event were being hosted in northern Europe.

The fog is of course of far greater significance to those for whom flying is an unlikely prospect. The homeless of north India have a miserable time while they contend with the chilly temperatures that accompany excessive fog. The official death toll this season has already passed the 500 mark.

So I felt lucky to escape to the warmth of Mumbai last weekend. And now I’m enjoying moderate temperatures while working in Jharkhand where the nights are chilly but, thanks to a stubborn sun, the days warm to a very pleasant 25C. I do however have to admit to suffering a tinge of frustration because I’m missing out on the fog which, as all photographers know, can make for dramatic pictures. This photograph of rickshaw drivers grappling with the cold was taken before dawn while I waited for my Delhi-bound train to arrive at Moradabad station in northern India. I’d spent the previous week photographing a polio vaccination campaign for UNICEF and though this picture had nothing to do with the commissioned work, it was perhaps the most memorable image that I captured on that trip. As I find is so often the case in photography, it was the incidental moment, neither planned nor anticipated that yielded the most significant result.

Jaipur’s fifth annual literature festival gets underway today. According to festival director and author William Dalrymple, writing in last Sunday’s Observer newspaper, the gathering is distinctive for it’s egalitarian spirit. Still in it’s infancy, but already attracting a long list of literary luminaries, Jaipur has apparently so far avoided the need for VIP enclosures and green rooms. Dalrymple proudly recalls the assimilation of Bollywood celebrities into the genial mood of previous gatherings at Jaipur. Having attended a few of book launches myself, I fully appreciate that maintaining this atmosphere of innocent bonhomie will be a difficult task.

It was ten minutes into the launch of the biography “Two Lives” by Vikram Seth at a hotel in Mumbai a couple of years ago that I noticed Bollywood star Aamir Khan taking his seat in the audience. If Khan thought that his late arrival would go unoticed, he was sadly mistaken. As soon as the press photographers attending the launch caught a whiff of the actor, they immediately dispensed with Seth and converged on Khan. The photographers’ tactless display of celebrity-worship completely undermined Seth’s introduction as his soft-spoken words were lost behind a blur of flash lights and the fuss surrounding Khan.

The potential for such commotion is unlikely to distract William Dalrymple from the infectious enthusiasm with which he champions the Jaipur literature festival. When I took this portrait of him just before Christmas, Dalrymple was already wearing his director’s hat and eagerly anticipating the literary excitement.

At the beginning of December, Financial Times reporter Amy Kazmin and I drove out beyond the eastern fringes of Delhi and towards the dusty plains of Uttar Pradesh state. Barely an hour from the comfortable residential neighbourhoods of the capital, we entered a world where the cars of the wealthy give way to swarms of bicycles and diesel-spluttering buses. We were in the district of Ghaziabad and on our way to meet the family of Monika Dagar who’s suspicious death at the age of twenty-one presents a disturbing insight into the pervasive influence of caste in India.

Monika Dagar met Gaurav Saini in an online chat-room in 2006. Typical of the new generation of aspirational middle-class urban Indians, the couple were required to tread a fine line between tradition and modernity. Theirs was a relationship that crossed caste-boundaries and as a consequence invited the disdain of Monika’s conservative family. The Dagars are members of the Jat caste, a patriarchal and influential north Indian community that has at times used violence to defend caste purity.

Resolute in their love, Monika and Gaurav nonetheless married in July last year. The wedding was a simple – and legal – ceremony witnessed by only a handful of friends. Significantly the union was not blessed by any member of Monika’s family. As is the tradition in India, Monika decided to move in with Gaurav and his parents in a lower middle class neighbourhood of south Delhi.

A week after the marriage the police, accompanied by some of Monika’s relatives, raided the Saini household in the middle of the night and forcibly removed the couple. Monika was handed over to her family in Ghaziabad while Gaurav was taken into custody. He was held for 32 days, accused of abducting a minor and of rape. Gaurav was twice denied bail despite the fact that Monika was over 18 years of age and testified that she had been neither abducted nor raped by Gaurav.

Since his release from police custody in August, Gaurav has been unable to locate the whereabouts of Monika who it is feared may have become the victim of an honour killing. Monika’s brother reported that his sister died of pneumonia in September though no official has verified her death and a postmortem was never conducted.

Thanks to Guarav’s determined and often lonely search for justice, a Delhi High Court hearing at the end of this month will decide whether a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry will be opened into the suspicious case of his missing wife. Gaurav meanwhile continues the search for Monika who he believes is still alive. “I don’t know where to go and which path I have to follow,” he says. “I am just living on the hope that some time she will be back.”

Amy Kazmin’s compelling report on this disturbing case – the culmination of several months of investigation – was published alongside my photos in the Financial Times magazine last weekend. The story raises several crucial questions about the role of the Indian state in protecting its citizens and depicts a frightening picture of India that is far removed from the content and positive image that many would like us to see.

This was one of those assignments that presents a very real challenge to a photographer. Working after the event meant that I was obviously unable to capture key moments in this story. Of course neither Amy nor I were able to meet Monika and as a consequence Gaurav became the focus of our coverage. I felt it important that the viewer be able to understand some of the anxieties that he was experiencing in his struggle for justice while appreciating the environment in which both he and Monika were raised.

Ultimately, the Financial Times magazine editors considered the significance of the young couple’s relationship so fundamental to the story that their affection for one another had to presented visually. Consequently they chose to reproduce a number of “collect photos” from Gaurav’s camera and these formed the basis of the opening spread. As much as I would have liked my photographs to have appeared more prominently in the feature I was entirely sympathetic to the editors decision to place them behind Gaurav’s blurred snapshots. The relevance of these photographs lies not in their quality but in the awkward depiction of an innocent and apparently unexceptional relationship that is so difficult to reconcile with the horror of subsequent events.

Exactly five years ago, on the morning of December 26th 2004, I climbed aboard a dawn flight from Delhi to Chennai. I had been busy with photography assignments over the previous few weeks and this was an opportunity to take a well-earned break. I was looking forward to a bit of relaxation and had packed my swimming gear together with a couple of books and some Christmas gifts for the friends with whom I would be staying.

As we flew south, I noticed Irish reporter David Orr sitting a few rows ahead of me on the plane. David and I had worked together on a couple of occasions so I wandered over to say hello. David explained to me that he and his family were on their way to the old colonial port of Pondicherry for a vacation by the sea. Easing into his economy-class seat, it was obvious that David had already left the anxieties of work behind him.

It was two hours later, while disembarking with my camera bag that David asked why I had bothered to bring along all of my equipment. Surely, he wondered, a holiday wasn’t really a holiday if accompanied by the paraphernalia of work. I always like to travel light so I didn’t consider my camera gear a hindrance. And besides, as a freelance photographer, it seemed sensible to be prepared for the unexpected. As I explained, “what if something were to happen?” David didn’t seem particularly convinced by my argument.

As we waited beside the luggage carrousel, the faint Indian airport-aroma of naphthaline drifting over us, David hurried over to me. This time he was looking a lot less relaxed. In fact he seemed rather anxious as he confided, “You know Tom, I think something has happened.”

David explained that there had been an earthquake. He wasn’t quite sure about the scale of the damage or indeed which part of the country had been affected but something had definitely happened. Misinformation and rumours spread quickly in India and it was entirely possible that David’s information had no basis in fact. But as the two of us bid goodbye and I left the terminal it became clear that something wasn’t quite right. The shambolic fray of taxi drivers, hotel agents and touts that had gathered at the airport gate appeared wholly distracted. Instead of clambering toward exiting passengers, eager to ply their services, they were ignoring us all and talking amongst themselves.

I hailed a taxi and asked the driver what had happened. He confirmed there had indeed been an earthquake followed by a big wave which had struck the coast of Chennai. Many had lost their lives, he said. It was becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss this as rumour but I still didn’t know enough to satisfy my curiosity. As we bounced along Chennai’s potholed roads, I plugged my mobile phone into my laptop. The internet connection was frustratingly slow but I soon gathered enough detail to appreciate that something momentous had affected the region at about the same time my plane had taken to the skies above Delhi.

On arrival at my friend’s house, I quizzed my host Jyashree for what she knew. She said she had been woken at dawn with the clutter on her dressing table shaking furiously. And there was talk in the city of a devastating wave that had swept across the Marina beach. On the television, they were discussing something called a tsunami.

My mobile soon began to ring. I spoke to journalist colleagues in Delhi who were keen to understand what was happening on the ground in Chennai. A picture emerged of unprecedented destruction. And in the South Asia region, Sri Lanka appeared to have borne the brunt of the momentous waves. It seemed obvious that this was the place to go. I approached a couple of newspapers in the UK and ultimately the Times of London assigned me to travel to Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka.

So it was that I arrived in the small fishing town of Kudawella on Sri Lanka’s south coast, 24 hours after the tsunami had struck. There was a uneasy and rather confused silence about those first few hours, punctuated by cries of grief as bodies were dragged from the shore or discovered among the debris of fallen buildings.

As we all now know, the tsunami was a momentous event that affected the lives of many hundreds of thousands across South and South-East Asia. I would not have been able to cover the immediate effect of the waves had I not decided to carry my cameras with me when I departed Delhi that morning of December 26th 2004. As for David Orr, his holiday was postponed as he traveled the ravaged coast of Tamil Nadu reporting on events for the British press.

I have since returned many times to document the longer-term effect the tsunami has had on the lives of a group of children from the south Indian district of Cuddalore. The photographs displayed here are a small selection from that series and feature two sisters, Vijita and Vijyashree Viswanathan who I am sure today will be thinking of the mother and brother they lost to the tsunami exactly five years ago.

Between a seven day stint confined to a hospital bed with malaria (see post below) and an assignment for a British newspaper magazine, I was lucky enough last week to escape to the east Indian town of Puri in Orissa for a particularly pleasant beach-side holiday. I did very little but relax, breathe in the ocean air and stroll along the shore with my camera. It was, as they say, just what the doctor ordered.

The south-facing coastline at Puri looks out towards the Bay of Bengal, providing spectacular views across the ocean at both dawn and dusk. Above is the scene that greeted me after I emerged from my hotel room one morning at 5.30am.

Of course the crows were there before me, unwittingly contributing to the drama of the morning sky.

Puri attracts middle class tourists from across India and like all seaside resorts, offers holiday-goers temporary release from their routine responsibilities. On spotting me with my camera one afternoon, this unlikely gathering of bathers insisted I take their portrait. They weren’t interested in viewing the pictures I took and I can only imagine that the simple process of being photographed provided them confirmation that this was indeed a special day. As soon as their portrait was taken they turned to face the ocean and rushed straight back in.

Beaches in India are wonderful places for photographs and the scenes at Puri reminded me of a feature I photographed in black & white in 2002 on the community that congregates every evening at Mumbai’s Juhu beach. This is a photograph from that story.

A few days ago I was discharged from hospital after spending a week undergoing treatment for malaria contracted while working in eastern India. It is not always easy being away from home when you’re ill. Indeed, those seven days stuck in a hospital bed might have provided me an excuse to wallow in my misfortune and get exasperated with the frustrations of living in India. While there were of course moments when I just wanted to be home, the spontaneous acts of kindness displayed by those who cared for me while I was sick provided me ample comfort and confirmed why I have such affection for this country.

For a week prior to the malaria, I’d been photographing a story on the provision of basic services including water and sanitation in the east Indian states of West Bengal and Jharkhand. I could never have imagined that my own personal experience would provide such a stark confirmation of the pressing need to invest in essential public infrastructure like drainage.

So it was, while in Jamshedpur on entering my hotel room at the end of a particularly long day, that I was struck by the first wave of nausea. Within seconds I was overcome with a shivering that found me clambering beneath the bed sheets in a futile attempt to warm myself up.

I had experienced these symptoms almost a year earlier while in Delhi and my initial fear was that this was another case of the dreaded dengue that had once left me so drained of energy. Eager not to repeat this distinctly unpleasant experience, I relayed my symptoms to the local UNICEF staff with whom I had been working. It was agreed that I immediately admit myself to Jamshedpur’s Tata Motors Hospital.

Two UNICEF doctors were dispatched to my side and escorted me the hour’s drive to the hospital. This was the beginning of an apparently boundless personal interest in my well-being among people I had never met before. After admitting me to the hospital, the same two doctors returned on separate occasions the following day, each of them with a friend, one of whom presented me with a small foil-wrapped rose. Yet another of their colleagues arrived on the third day, again accompanied by a friend.

I was grateful for these acts of kindness but it was the medical staff at the Tata Motors Hospital who displayed a generosity of spirit that went way beyond the call of duty. As a relatively young foreigner on a ward full of local elderly men I was clearly something of a novelty for the nurses, most of whom were troubled by my being struck down with an illness while traveling so far away from home. I was showered with questions regarding my family, my marital status and what had brought me to India. One nurse announced that I was the first foreigner with whom she had ever spoken and several insisted on bringing to my bedside colleagues whose responsibilities lay well beyond the confines of Male Ward Number Two.

The elderly Nurse Paul was one of those hailing from a separate wing of the hospital. It was on presenting herself to me that she immediately announced she was Roman Catholic and would therefor be praying for me. I expressed my appreciation which prompted her to ask if I too was Roman Catholic. Dressed in a white nurses uniform, complete with a hat and looking herself not unlike a nun, it seemed churlish to disappoint her. Besides, I was sure that divulging my atheism to Nurse Paul would have unduly burdened her with an obligation to introduce me to Jesus and other figures from the bible. This process would have inevitably taken a long time and I was certain that working in a hospital shouldered her with responsibilities far more urgent than my salvation.

Nurse Paul was just the beginning of a long line of concerned parties among the nursing staff. There was the chatty and decidedly healthy-looking Anglo-Indian Nicola from Kolkata who comforted me with the revelation that she too had recently recovered from malaria. And it was while taking my blood-pressure that one of the Malayali nurses lamented the Indian postal service that, for the loss of an invitation letter from Ireland, would have seen her working on the distant ward of a hospital in Dublin. She told me that she was one of three sisters brought up by a single mother who was proud that her daughters had each achieved the independent means of a career in nursing.

On one occasion I woke up from an afternoon snooze to a find a group of giggling student nurses standing at the bottom of my bed. Chaperoned by one of the senior nursing staff, these young women who were all still in their teens seemed to be struck by a self-conscious and nervous anxiety that obliged me to take the lead in conversation. And so it went on… for seven days I wasn’t able to feel lonely or sorry for myself such was the concern for my welfare among those looking after me.

Amid this kindness, my mind kept returning to an encounter with a doctor in West Bengal’s Purbamedinipur district who had introduced himself to me just a few days earlier. Unfortunately he disappeared before I could take his portrait but he left behind a note which in hindsight seems particularly prophetic for it is highly likely that I contracted malaria while photographing in the mosquito-ridden district in which he worked. His  words read:

“From Dr Ramesh Chandra Bera. Highly pleased to see and meet you. Moto: Health is wealth and How to keep fit 100yrs of life. Remember 26.10.2009, 9-45am”