He was childlike with a camera in his hands -- not naïve, but wonderstruck, as though the world were always on the verge of delivering something unrepeatable.
Pulitzer Prize nominee Namas Bhojani recalls his long association with Raghu Rai, the legendary photographer who passed into the ages on Sunday.
I first encountered Raghu Rai's images in my early teens, studying at the Sri Aurobindo International School of Education in Pondicherry, long before I became a photographer myself and a colleague working alongside him.
The Ashram held an annual photography salon, and two photographers' black-and-white prints commanded the room every year.
Those were the images made by S Paul and Raghu Rai.
Raghu Rai's coverage of the Bangladesh genocide and liberation reshaped visual understanding of South Asian history.
Paul was Raghu's elder brother, and was then chief photographer at the Indian Express
Even when they photographed something as basic as a farm worker plowing soil ahead of the monsoon, the ordinary became electric -- dark clouds formed in the background, adding depth to the monochrome.
There was weather in those photographs.
Scenes from the Bangladesh Liberation War captured with rare proximity and human sensitivity.
I will leave the larger appraisals of Raghu's career -- his decades of work, his humanity, his love of music and plants -- to those more eloquent on the subject.
What I can offer are the close encounters, the afternoons and evenings, and what I understood of his eye.
Powerful documentation of conflict revealing the human cost of war in South Asia.
Iconic frames from the liberation period capturing resilience and struggle.
In the 1980s, I was a young photographer at Bombay magazine, the sister publication of India Today, shooting everyone from business tycoons to Bollywood stars.
I had photographed Dhirubhai Ambani for T N Ninan's first cover story on him in India Today.
By the time Reliance's attempt of a hostile takeover of L&T was making the news, Dhirubhai had become a legend.
It was Raghu who flew down to shoot the follow-up.
He'd grown close to Anil Ambani -- whose wedding he'd photographed -- and had been assigned to document the Reliance-sponsored cricket World Cup.
I was there to assist, mostly because Raghu loved natural light and was visibly uneasy with strobes and artificial setups.
The image Reliance uses everywhere to this day -- of Dhirubhai with his fingers resting against his face, side-lit, commanding -- came from that shoot.
I was in the room.
I was also at Anil and Tina Ambani's wedding at the Cooperage football stadium, transformed for the occasion into something between a fairground and a Mughal court.
Raghu was there too, and watching him work was a kind of education.
He was childlike with a camera in his hands -- not naïve, but wonderstruck, as though the world were always on the verge of delivering something unrepeatable.
He shot with tremendous physical energy, exploding from one frame to the next as if stillness itself would be some kind of loss.
He was constitutionally incapable of letting a moment pass.
When digital cameras arrived and photographers began migrating from film, Raghu was among the happiest of converts.
I'll be able to see what I got within moments, he'd say.
No waiting for the darkroom.
His aesthetic was naturally beautiful, and not by accident.
He was, at heart, a romanticist who happened to be a photojournalist.
Even his most devastating image, of a child being buried in the aftermath of the Bhopal gas tragedy, carried that quality: Direct, bold, heartbreaking, and yet holding the fundamental sense of tragedy.
Raghu's eyes lit up when he met you.
His love for people and his compassion for those around him showed up in his photographs.
He was not a cerebral photographer.
Image-making seemed to arrive in him the way a tune arrives in a musician.
But what appeared effortless had been shaped by decades of practice.
Photography, for Raghu, was something close to meditation.
His book on the Taj Mahal stunned everyone who saw it.
By then I had moved to Delhi and was photo editor at Business Today.
The love in those images for the monument, for the light, for white marble at different hours, and stunning.
Satyajit Ray in a rare, intimate moment.
There was a fashion shoot in Delhi around that time, for an India Today story featuring Firoze Gujral and Gurmeet Rai -- the latter not yet an architect, and not yet Raghu's wife.
I went along to the leased studio to assist, having more experience with lighter editorial subjects.
We ended up with more beautiful frames than we could use: Firoze's photograph ran on the English India Today cover, Gurmeet's on the Hindi edition.
I also recall a cover shoot about espionage -- Raghu and I staging a furtive transaction, photographed through a keyhole.
It was that kind of decade.
In the late nineties, back from a sabbatical at Stanford and consulting for the Indian edition of Cosmopolitan, I visited Raghu at his seven-acre farm just outside Delhi.
He had fallen deeply in love with the land, the trees, and the unhurriedness of life.
During that visit, he urged me to buy the two acres next door.
The asking price was ten lakh rupees, money I didn't readily have, having just turned thirty.
He was not sympathetic.
"What are you doing?" he said, scolding me openly. "A photographer your age should have made himself financially secure by now."
Had I listened, I would have spent far more time with Raghu.
And the land would have appreciated a thousand times or more.
The farm itself was a revelation.
In his private rooms, Raghu had assembled what could only be described as an architectural jumble.
There were old doors, salvaged windows, fragments collected on travels, worked into the walls of his palatial home with complete disregard for coherence.
It should have been dreadful. It was, somehow, wonderful.
That was Raghu's gift: He believed in himself with such unaffected certainty that you found yourself nodding along, convinced.
And even if the hodgepodge didn't fully persuade you, his delight in it was impossible to resist.
At India Today, where Raghu served as photo editor, he called the editor-owner Aroon Purie "Sher Singh", a nickname that captured something about their relationship.
He would argue with Aroon endlessly over page space, pressing for photographs where the chartered accountant in Aroon saw only advertising revenue surrendered.
It took one Punjabi to outlast another: Raghu would cajole, then insist, then dig in, until Aroon would finally concede.
Not because he'd been won over, but because it was simply easier to say yes than to keep going.
They were magnificent arguments to witness.
About a decade ago, Raghu was in Bangalore to visit his youngest daughter, who was studying at the Srishti School of Design.
He came over one evening.
By an unfortunate coincidence, our giant eight-foot double door refrigerator had chosen that week to stop making ice -- a catastrophe, since Raghu could not drink without it.
He was particular about his whisky in that way.
I scrambled to the teetotaller neighbour and returned victorious.
Raghu settled onto the sofa, and the evening stretched pleasantly.
At some point, without announcement, he picked up a camera and began photographing my wife and me as we talked: Casual, unhurried frames of an ordinary evening.
That was the last time I saw him.
My icebox is full now, and a few prized single malts wait on the shelf for special guests.
But Raghu is gone, and there is a specific sadness in knowing that particular evening of the ice, the sofa, his camera turning toward us without warning, will never come again.
And the story continues... through Raghu Rai's lens.
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff
