Six Hours of Commuting Everyday, One Photo at a Time

I decided to take some time out and talk a little about the things that I caught through the shutters of my camera.

Children sleep carefree on the train while their parents are guarding their belongings nearby. All photo credits to the author.

A month away from the university would teach me a lot of things, I anticipated. But what was unexpected is that traveling would teach me exponentially more things.

Traveling for around 6 hours everyday leaves me with so much time to be with myself in the midst of all the chaos, hustle, and bustle of the semi-rural as well as the city life that I’m surprised by the different realities everyone’s living with. Everyday.

In this article, I want to let out a few of my captures from this month and leave the floor open to your interpretation of the same. It’s truly wonderful how pictures make the moments eternal, in a way.

I was just reading an article about the same in *Full Frame*, a photography publication here on Medium, about the fleeting nature of the occurrences a photograph sometimes captures and immortalizes.

It truly resonated with me. I started to notice things that were rather not so aesthetically pleasing or exceptional enough to catch an eye in the fast-moving world. I wanted to click a picture — for my jellyfish memory — and to remember the thought I’d had when I saw that picture’s content in real life.

1/ A presser (or, presswala) ironing the cloth

A presser (or, presswala) ironing the cloth.

I love the serenity, simplicity, authenticity, and determination that this picture reflects.

I live in New Delhi, India but there I don’t usually give clothes to the laundry and wash them myself in the washing machine that our batch students have collectively purchased.

Right now, as I’m in my hometown, sometimes we give out formal clothes that I wear to my court internship everyday to the presswala for ironing.

The other day when I went with my dad to collect the clothes, one of the shirts was yet to iron.

When we arrived, he hesitated a little before taking out our clothes, spreading it out unevenly first, spraying a little water and then putting his coal-powered iron to work.

He appeared so serene, so focused on his work that it made my mind slow down, observe, and appreciate the dedication and work that he put into making my shirt wrinkle — free for my next working day at the court.

I woke up the next day, took a bath in the cold waters as that’s what keeps me refreshed in the scorching summers of India, and when I was folding my sleeves and tucking in the shirts, I remembered the work that he’d put in.

2/ People bargaining at the fish market

People bargaining at the fish market.

Though there’s nothing much special about this frame in isolation, this still is of exact moment when the presswala was ironing clothes in his shop on one side of the road, while the chaos of bargaining was unfurling on the other side.

It depicts, for me, the two realities that exist rather simultaneously. Serenity and chaos, both.

3/ A man doing his job of folding the pipes after cleaning the railway platform

A man doing his job of folding the pipes after cleaning the railway platform

This picture failed to capture an important detail: a dog that was passing by that had only three legs. Most likely, it lost one of its legs by coming under a train.

Now why is that important to this picture, you ask?

It’s because the fact that both this uncle and that dog walked in a weirdly similar way.

They both were walking by taking a graceful, springy step by pushing off with one foot and putting all the pressure on the other.

When they crossed each others’ paths — that this image failed to capture — I couldn’t help but wonder how this place, even after it was the sheer reason for the dog to lose its leg, was its home and it would not trade this place for any other.

As for the man who was folding the pipes, the sheer exhaustion on his face made me wonder about the jobs a man does to keep the family fed. This job for him was a home away from home.

Same scene, two different scenarios.

4/ Now onto some miscellaneous ones:

Experiencing a sunset from a train station that I cross on my way to the internship.

Nature slowly claiming what is hers.

Bygone days of public entertainment during the bus travel that now sit within a storage space collecting dust.

People are waiting for their train, or maybe not, and are just sitting there.

A man with his stuff looking at the men in the above picture in the hope that they’d buy some stuff.

My study desk one night before my last exam.