Raghu Rai Upheld Values That Institutions Often Abandoned |
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The interview took place in Delhi, in an office that hummed with the particular self-importance of a publication that had decided it was the country’s most important. I had travelled from Madras with a portfolio in three parts: photographs from the frontlines of the Sri Lanka conflict: refugees crossing the Palk Strait in open boats, LTTE cadres and leaders, the dead; pictures of life in rural Tamil Nadu; and a published photo essay on Kalakshetra, the great dance school in Madras, shot for a travel magazine.
Raghu Rai, the picture editor, moved through the first two groups the way a customs official moves through luggage in which he expects to find nothing. He asked a question here and there, and said nothing about the photographs themselves. Then he opened the travel magazine. He stopped. The briskness left him. He looked up – looked at me as though for the first time, which in some essential way he was – and asked about the experience of making those photographs. He used the word ‘sensitivity’. He wanted to know what it had felt like to be inside that world, among those dancers, in the particular quality of light and devotion that filled that place, making those images. We talked, without hurry, about this and that. I got the job.
I did not understand, then, what he had done in that room. He had looked past the conflict photographs – past what I thought I was, and past what the magazine believed it wanted – and found what I actually had to offer. That was Raghu’s gift: he did not read the photograph, he read the person who had made it.
I was posted in Madras, and the magazine – based in Delhi, staffed largely by editors who spoke of anyone from the south as Madrasi with the casual cruelty of people who have never examined their own geography – had little use for the south unless a story was deemed large enough to justify an excursion. It was not called North India Today in the southern states without reason. Sri Lanka was the exception. It offered per diem in foreign currency and proximity to a war – for those who shadowed the military, moving from front lines to diplomatic corridors under escort. Editorials mirrored Delhi’s mood. Editors parachuted in and out. They invariably returned – having, for the most part, been conducted through IPKF (Indian Peace Keeping Force)-controlled areas – with strong opinions and publishable bylines, in that order. I was already........