The Country Within

A photographer sets out on a 12-month tour to experience 13 festivals in India. During this journey spanning more than 45,000 km, he travels from villages in Nagaland where the sun rises at 4 a.m., to Himalayan villages that have no telephone connections or even to the hostels of one of the premier technological institutes of the country. He celebrates gun-firing mock wars with a traditional headhunter tribe, is astounded by dancing pot-bellied men painted as tigers and relives Krishna’s childhood in an eleven-day enactment put up in a town where all the world, literally, is a stage! And as the colours of Holi at Krishna’s birthplace and the sights of dancing monks at a Buddhist monastery embrace him, they are captured by the lenses of his camera. The Country Within, a book of 13 essays of candid photographs with an introduction at the beginning of each, is a colourful montage of the diversity and uniqueness of India. It is a journey not only into the soul of India but also to the soul within. It is a journey to the country which one has within one’s soul.