The Transcript!
Hello. Good afternoon. I am Rajiv Chopra from what I now call the Dusty Mic Chronicles. Sorry, it's the Dusty Mic podcast. Whatever. Anyway, a few weeks back I had sent one of my photographs or a photograph that I had taken in or at the Jama masjid in Delhi. I was there at. I arrived there at 8:00 in the morning and I walked around for almost two hours and I left before it became too hot. We are in the middle of summer, so the days are hot and unusually humid. But the weather patterns have changed. Climate has changed. For some reason we don't seem to accept that anyway. Anyway, when you are doing street photography in many parts of India, you start to take many things for granted. One is the garbage, the dust and the noise, and the smell. You just can't get away from it. And the second is the sight of fauna on the streets. And when I say fauna on the streets, it could be cattle, dogs, cats. In very few places you might find a pig or two, and again, in very few places you might find a few goats. But for the most part, let's talk about dogs and cats and of course, cows. But let's not talk about cows today. So I was walking at the Jama Masjid area, and I noticed this small cat. It was somewhere between being a full-grown cat and a kitten. Maybe you can call it a kitting.
The cat sat under a two-wheeler scooter. That's the image that you see at the top of this podcast episode. Eating into breakfast from the size and the shape of the meat it was eating. I could make out that the cat was eating a piece of mutton or a piece of goat. Raw goat, of course. So I photographed the animal eating its breakfast and I walked around taking or making 4 or 5 photographs. Crouching low. Sorry. I crouched low to take the photographs, and I was careful not to disturb the cat while it was eating his breakfast because I did not want the cat to believe that I'm some sort of a hostile alien, because then it would either run away or run towards me and possibly scratch me. And if it scratched me, then I would have to get a rabies vaccination. I sent one of these photographs to an American photographer for a review, and the feedback that I got was that the image was gross and that it was an odd image to send for a review. The question for me and I have not yet responded to this photographer. I intend to do so in the next 1 or 2 days, because I'm trying to calibrate what kind of response I would give. But in India, where we see strays all around the place, a cat or a dog eating something is absolutely normal. It's something which we just take in our stride and just keep moving on.
However, I absolutely understand that somebody in America or in Europe or Australia, maybe China, Singapore, Dubai would be horrified by such a site because they're just not used to seeing stray animals on the street, and they're not used to seeing stray animals eating on the street. We have domesticated cattle, dogs, cats, and a few other species of fauna to suit our needs, so we have become sanitised. Yeah, that's the word that I would use. We become sanitised, and anything that disturbs our somewhat antiseptic view of life disturbs us. I am tempted to talk about Gaza right now, but I won't do that. So let me talk about a few other things that I have seen in India. There was this movie that was popular, I think it was called Salaam Bombay. And in one of the scenes they have or they show an underworld guy or petty underworld guy taking out the eye of a young person he had put on the streets. And when I spoke with a few of my Western friends, they went, oh, oh my goodness, this is terrible. I've seen that. I haven't seen anyone actually taking out somebody's eye. But when I started my career many years ago in Bombay, I used to take the local train to my place of work, come back in the evening and cross over to my side of the exit where I would then take a train or bus and go back to my apartment.
There used to be this young girl. Maybe she was about eight years old. Very pretty. Underneath all the dust, the grime and all of that. I could see that she was very pretty. And she used to sit there in the corner of the overbridge, begging for money. One day she disappeared. I didn't think too much about it, because I thought that maybe she had moved her place of work. Or if you want to call begging work. But yes, it is the kind of work and I didn't think too much about it. About a month later she reappeared and I could see right through where her left eye should have been. I could see right through to the orbital socket or the skull behind, and the white of the bone gleamed at me. Now, I ask you, what is gross, that sort of human act, or a cat eating in the most natural way that it knows? I've never seen a cat, except possibly in animated films. I've never seen a cat sitting at a table with a knife and fork and nice cutlery, wearing a bow tie in a suit or a sari or whatever, and eating and adhering to human norms of polite behavior. It just eats. That's what it does naturally. And for me, it's a very natural act. So I might not exhibit such a photograph in the West, but I will photograph such images in India.
So what is gross? How do you define gross? Is something that's gross for you? Gross for me? It's something which I believe we need to think about. Because for me, the act of taking out a girl's. I just so that you can make some money is absolutely gross. For me, the act of people standing around idly while someone is lying on the street in pain is gross. And I have seen quite a few very gross sites, the sites of the site of human cruelty and people's indifference. That for me is gross. Not a cat crouching on the street, eating its food in the only way it knows. We need to be clear about what is gross, what is not gross, and we need to understand that we have moved so far away from nature that we are in danger of losing something of ourselves. And that is, I believe, a fundamental difference between being aware of animal life, being aware that there are aspects of life beyond our nice, sanitized life. So when you're out on the street, don't impose your judgment. Don't impose your perception on what should be pretty and what should be aesthetically pleasing to certain standards. So that's where we are. And think about this the next time you take your camera out to the streets or wherever to take photographs. See you next time and I hope you. I hope this episode has given you some food for thought. Ciao.
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