This project is about showing how it feels to be under privileged to know what’s going on right next to you and how the curiosity is universal. An attempt to pass on the eagerness the plantation workers had to know what’s going on Next-door.
Years of working in the plantation must have made the workers feel at home in land they dwell throughout the year and one day they see a large ground being prepared separated from the now off season tea plants by a tin metal sheets. And then people with loud bikes and cars started flowing in through the narrow rough road to the stadium. The atmosphere they must have related to the local festivals they have been to. But in this case they can’t witness it from close, because there’s a ticket and it’s more than what they can afford.
I was travelling Assam with my friend Abhiroop and we decided to go for an off-road racing event inside one of the large tea plantations in Gholaghat. We got there on second day and immediately I realised for the magnanimity of the place they have built the crowd is not enough and it made the ground look empty and the races went on with very few spectators. In one of the intervals between races I strolled out the tin walls to have a look around the place and to find out where our tents for the night are going to be.
Outside it was a different story, throughout the length of the long wall there were people trying to steal a peek to see inside. They stood on higher grounds to get a clear view, tip-toeing, some who could, climbed trees and some peeped through gaps in the wall. They were in groups of friends, neighbours and some came with entire family. The way arrived well dressed and ready reminded me of how people went to festival in temple next to my home back in Kerala.
I was no more curious to know what was happening inside.
About Ashiq MK
I was born and brought up in Malappuram, Kerala but I have always been out of home since graduation days. I started spending more time shooting and knowing Photography after my graduation. Later I left my engineering job to pursue photography. Slowly I started seeing the world through photography, almost every big event in history or present days have some images attached to it, so when you go through those images you can’t miss how it came to being.
Through Photography I also came to know amazing people in from of teachers, co-travellers, people of serene villages in far away places and that one tea seller in one early winter morning near Yamuna who described to me how beautiful winter mornings are back in his village in Uttar Pradesh.
For me not everything is to be Photographed, I am not willing to trade feeling to seeing. But I guess one will know when one should shoot, because most of time when I felt I should shoot had to return empty handed.
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Copyrights:
All the pictures in this post are copyrighted Ashiq MK. Their reproduction, even in part, is forbidden without the explicit approval of the rightful owners.
