Photographed in Andaman & Nicobar Islands in 2013, This is a long exposure photo series captured during a sunrise or a sunset, has been treated with zero to minimal photoshop editing in order to preserve the true natural colours captured in reality. The series juxtaposes the concepts of stillness and movement.
An opportunity to visit the Andaman & Nicobar Islands came my way in 2013, almost a decade after the 2004 Tsunami that caused a lot of damage to both the islands as well as the people living there. What happened in 2004 was a natural calamity, an act of nature, nobody could have done anything about that. But what happens after such a calamity, that is our responsibility. Unfortunately, a lot of the inhabitants of Nicobar Island were still displaced during the time I visited, still living in refugee camps, 10 years after.
There is a peculiar beauty to nature that no amount of human failures can ever overshadow. Andaman & Nicobar Islands is a testimony to that. So much sorrow and suffering the people in these lands have seen, yet the waters and skies are abundant and rapidly transforming with all the colours and textures that you could possibly attribute to them.
Most of us who lived in overcrowded cities merely experience weather and are at most times inconvenienced by it. We lack the opportunity to interact with nature in a way that amazes and humbles us. We have been forced to disconnect from the emotional impact that the visual reality of nature can invoke in us. We seek solace by being absorbed in the technologies we have created while sitting in little boxes looking in to one another. We ignore the plastic on the roads, the smog in the sky and the pollution on the roads, all for the hope of finding something or arriving somewhere one day. Some of us do find it someday, some of us are still seeking. But ask anyone who has sat down to soak in a sunset on the beach at Chidiya Tapu in Havelock, and they will tell you, for those brief moments, they had everything they desired. Yet, a nagging thought made me wonder, would those survivors from Nicobar, displaced and living in refugee camps even after 10 years stop to think the same?
Though years have passed and most nicobarians are probably no longer refugees, the deeper perspective meaning even today.