Beyond The Image
An unposed photo in India remains the best I've ever taken.
Saturday March 5, 2016 found us (that being myself, my ex-wife and our then 11-year old younger son) barely two months into our global year-round backpacking sabbatical, on our final morning in Ooty, Tamil Nadu, southern India. Ooty is considered the Queen of Hill Stations, as the British called those towns they favoured as cool retreats during the stifling Indian summers; Ooty, being also the summer capital of the disingenuously-titled colonially-imposed “Madras” Presidency, necessitated building a narrow gauge “Toy Train” railway line to navigate the multiple turns up the mountains. That train line is now designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, and we would take it later that day down to Coimbatore on our long journey to Fort Kochi.
No such grand designation serves the local peak Doddabetta which, though it tops out at a relatively impressive 2,637 metres (8,652 ft), the highest in the state of Tamil Nadu and a close call for highest in all of southern India, is accessible by road and has a busy market up top. This is not the leave-no-trace Adirondacks.
Me, though, I like to run, and that Saturday morning, while Posie and Noel attended the local Botanical Gardens, I intended to jog up to the peak. This wasn’t an especially difficult challenge, given that service road was barely two miles long; getting the bus there was by far the bigger challenge. And the summit itself was only just at the elevation that might start impacting on my breathing; I was doing this purely for the recreational fun of it.
Nonetheless, I was aware that morning as I set off up the hill, as I – we – had been several times already during the last week or so in which we’d navigated our way down the western interior of India, that I seemed to be the only white person in sight. This ought to have been surprising, given Ooty’s tourist reputation, but then again, not that many tourists take local buses or run to local mountaintops.
I was aware, too, by now, that Indian people love interacting with white people. A horrible generalization perhaps, and one that seems to come loaded with colonial superiority perspectives, but hear me out: on a core level of human behavior, we had found our hosts perpetually curious about us, incredibly forward and friendly as is the Indian way, and - especially among the middle class with their disposable income - ever eager to take selfies with a white person. I loved hanging and chatting with these Indians, be they tech workers from Bangalore spending a weekend at Honey Valley Estate in Karnataka, or street merchants at a coffee stall in Mysuru. If you can keep up with the frenetic pace of the country, it’s perhaps the friendliest place on earth.
Still, I was the only one at pace that morning as I jogged up Doddabetta. I knew I was getting the occasional curious look, especially from those ensconced in taxis to the summit, and I trusted that my western athletic clothes were not too alien to the beautifully dressed families who had parked at the foot of the service road and were taking leisurely walks to the top themselves.
Close to the peak, I saw a group of young Indians ahead of me - teenage boys and girls, in jeans and saris, trim and fit, happy and carefree. I jogged around them, offering a brief nod and smile as I did, and no sooner had I gotten ahead than I heard their already animated voices increase in volume, and their footsteps rise in pace. Instinctively, I knew they were running after me.
There was surely nothing here for me to fear, but at the same time it was odd. So I turned around.
“Can we run with you?” asked one of the teens, smiling broadly.
“Can you show us how to run,” asked another.
This truly caught me by surprise. Just a week or so earlier, our host at the Honey Valley Estate, the sagacious Suresh, had told us that Indians (by which he meant this middle class) had “forgotten how to walk.” What he meant was that they no longer did it for exercise. And clearly, this group was claiming, additionally, and sincerely, they had forgotten how to run. Which is insane, of course, because it’s innate.
“Put one foot in front of the other,” I said as I jogged slowly, backwards, a little bemused by the fact I was giving such basic advice. “Don’t worry about speed.”
They fell into a broad line, and I saw joy in their faces that reflected the India I had so far come to know. Best of all, they hadn’t made me stop for a selfie. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t my turn to capture a moment. I whipped my iPhone 5s out from my pocket and pointed it at them. I’d bought it especially for this trip but while a reliable enough phone, it was a shitty camera, and one of the only things I lament about that year-long journey is the poor quality of photographs I came home with. Nonetheless, I called out for the crowd of teens to give me a pose or something similar, and then, more in hope than expectation, clicked twice. We exchanged some thumbs ups, some whoops and hollers and a few more words in English, and then I turned around to resume my jog. Soon, I heard them slow behind me, presumably happy with the fact that they’d jogged 50 yards or more.
That was the last I ever saw of them - though at the summit, once I took to walking around the market area, I was promptly deluged with so many selfie requests that, truly, it occurred to me that this must be how a film star feels when they get recognized in a public place. Eventually, I had to say “no.”
Finally, amidst the various lovely summit views and failed attempts to navigate my way back down via a trail as opposed to the road, I found a peaceful spot to sit and contemplate without being hassled in that friendly but invasive Indian manner. I looked at the photographs I’d taken.
Most of the viewpoint shots were typically dull, not a patch on what I could still experience with the naked eye. But the shots of these teenagers… one in particular captured the moment as if it has been planned for weeks. The smiling girls on the flanks, in their saris and tunics, especially the one on my far left, with her additional pink headdress, equally lurid trousers, spotted green tunic, and perfect teeth. The four boys in the middle, all of them in jeans, grinning with unforced ease, hands raised in some kind of communal salute of cultural solidarity, one of them protecting himself from the sun – it wouldn’t have been the heat – with a headdress and sunglasses, just one of them preferring sports shoes over the otherwise de rigueur Indian preference for sandals. The girl bang in the middle behind them, in jeans and a modest top, hand raised, as beautifully contented in that moment as God can confer on a human.
These were the Indian people I met more often than I didn’t. Happy, confident, contented, energetic, enthusiastic, and often exhausting people. They had their whole lives ahead of them, and their futures look as bright in that moment as the pink on the outlying girl. I would travel for eight more months, seven more countries, taking at least a couple of photographs every single day. I took some more decent photos, but I never got anywhere close to such an image as this, again.
A year or two later, I had the photo printed out professionally, close to poster size. I then paid to have it properly framed, and it now hangs with some other travel art in my new home. It’s my personal photographic prize pride and joy.
When I look at that picture now, in 2024, here on my computer at this moment or on the wall when I pass it by, I can’t help but wonder… What became of them all? Did their lives continue down as prosperous and happy a path as it seemed to be on, that day over eight and a half years ago? How many of them ended up in tech jobs in Bangalore, or studying abroad, or getting a job abroad? How many of them are married with children? Did the women find equality? Did any of them struggle, fall off the path, get left behind? Did the universal law of unfair averages pick on one of them with a fatal illness, or a traffic death, or something equally tragic? And perhaps more poignantly, thinking of my own youthful friendship groups, do they still keep in touch with each other?
Every now and then it occurs to me to wonder this, too… Do they ever think back on that day, and how happy they were, and is there a chance that if so, one of them thinks of that moment on the road up Dodabetta when a baldish 50-something white guy in athletic clothes pointed his camera at them as they jogged after him? Did they ever think how those photos might have turned out, and whether one unplanned shoot-and-point snap on a shitty digital camera was worth all the selfies in the world?
My thanks to Kate from
, who runs a Substack that, specifically with your digital photographs, “encourages you to write your stories and leave a legacy, so that future ancestry hunters learn who we really were.” I hope you too will take her lead.Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith, posts twice a week. Typically, the longer post is at the weekend. Free subscribers get most posts; paid subscribers get exclusive interview transcripts, the Crossed Channels podcast, and access to all the archives. They also support my work and keep me doing it. Thank you.
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Hi Tony, In the last two summer Olympic Games, I noticed more Indian athletes than ever. The Indian government must have instituted sports and fitness programs as part of a national health initiative to address this issue you highlighted. :)
Thanks @SteveSchallencamp. (For some reason I am having trouble posting in the 'reply' section...) Without researching it all, I would just speculate that the growing economy would have allowed India to make investments in certain sports and fitness programs with a definite desire to compete internationally. That same growing economy is the one that allows others in what has historically been a very fit country (you don't see many overweight people in India) to take taxis where previously they might have walked. In that sense not unlike the States or the UK or anywhere else that has incredible athletes alongside problems of obesity etc.
And a definite disclaimer... As well as noting that you don't see so many overweight people in India, they take certain national sports incredibly seriously. Cricket certainly, kabaddi (look it up!) and a growing participation
in footie/soccer.
Thanks for popping in and commenting.