Looking Back Looking Forward

It’s perhaps in quest of the old Raghu, the photographer who changed the language of Indian cameras not once, not twice, but repeatedly, that Rai likes to rummage through his archives. This time around, it yielded a photo of Mrs G and a toddler Varun. ‘‘I see in him the same aggression once associated with Mrs Gandhi,’’ Rai leans across the table to emphasise his point. ‘‘Priyanka and Rahul are nice, likeable young people. But Varun is something else.’’

Rai doesn’t normally spell out his insights, preferring to let his camera do the talking. But this is a subject close to his heart, just as Mrs G was, and he is quite happy to let his attention wander from the supersized photograph he is touching up. ‘‘She was the most charismatic, the most charming leader we have had,’’ he says. ‘‘I can’t even imagine wanting to shoot any of today’s leaders in the way I photographed her. Forget the security issues, who has the energy, the aura that she possessed?’’

To an artist, Rai says, that is the only quality that makes a photograph. Shooting Mumbai recently on assignment for Geo, Rai found it in abundance in the country’s most-globalised city, but he is not sure if that calls for a separate tome on the lines of Delhi (1983 and 1994) or Calcutta (1989). ‘‘There have been others shooting Mumbai, Namas Bhojani, Bruno Cancellieri, they’ve all done the city. I have to look for something new; each frame should have something fresh. Everything else is information.’’
India’s most celebrated photographer’s beginnings are well-chronicled. Born in Punjab in 1942, Rai first picked up a camera while hanging about with elder brother, the phenomenally talented photographer S Paul. The younger sibling went on to win national and international accolades even as Paul deliberately chose to maintain a lower profile. Rai is phlegmatic about the irony. ‘‘It is true I was inspired by my brother to take photographs,’’ he says, then veers into the third person, ‘‘But just thrusting a camera into someone’s hands does not make a photographer. There has to be a vision, a drive.’’

Maybe an inborn talent? The reply takes you by surprise. ‘‘I don’t subscribe to the view that either you have (talent) or you don’t,’’ he says emphatically. ‘‘What one does need is the ability to see eternity in an instant, to know the precise moment that all the essential elements come together to create a symphony that can touch even the ignorant. That, to me, is the perfect photograph.’’

In a narrower, personal sense, the perfect picture is provided by the Family Rai, comprising wife Gurmeet, a conservation activist, and two kids Avani and Purvai, who share frame space with Cartier-Bresson in the photographer’s office. Bits of their lives are in his portfolio as well, the birth of one daughter recorded in My Land and its People, a shot of the Sunderbans featuring a sleepy-eyed Gurmeet. This is his second marriage—one son from first wife Usha is photographer Nitin Rai—but Rai now has a third baby: his digital camera.

‘‘It’s amazing, what it allows you to do,’’ he says, handling it with care. ‘‘Every morning, I see the first shot I’ve taken, and I tell myself, ‘How could you take such a step (frame)?’ With every shot, it’s teaching me something new.’’

And as long as the digital keeps up its lessons, chances are the second, ‘real’ camera will keep on taking the shots.