Day 4

9 am
I spent the morning printing the pictures from yesterday. All the photos from last night turned out well and only one was a little fuzzy from movement. The camera works well in the dark picking up background objects as well as the foreground without bleaching out close up objects too much or reflecting too strongly of glass surfaces. Later Shobha came and we printed a few more pictures that she wanted and then stuck the set on to large sheets of paper to display them.

Shobha had brought four of the children’s files from the office. The stories are mixed tales of poverty and tragedy. Parents who died young, from unknown causes, or from TB, young unmarried mothers, fathers who have fled, a child left property that was taken by relatives and he was turned out to survive without food or shelter. Grandparents and uncles and aunts who tried to cope but couldn’t because of their own poverty, ill health or because they feared for the child if they were soon to die. In each file there are photos of each child taken each year, letters from relatives, legal documents assigning the child to the village. Once here they belong here; no-one is fostered or given back.

3 pm
Shobha, Mrs Cord and I took the Village bus to Lalbagh Gardens near the centre of the city. It is a popular place to visit for families, courting couples and others. The only problem was that it is a place where almost everyone goes to take photos, which made it difficult for the children to think outside of the conventions of such photographs. So mostly what we got was a variety of posed pictures of ourselves, some very good, but somewhat staged.

Thinking about this I feel that if our project task is to get the children to express what happiness/peace means to them, then one important aspect of the study is to create situations in which they feel happy and then to see how they express this. So what we may have is a set of fairly conventional poses, but they are pictures of the children enjoying themselves. Perhaps the test will be in how they talk about the pictures.

We failed to find the Snow White clock, which several of the children knew about and which is mentioned in my Lonely Planet Guide, where it is described as ‘surreal’. I was disappointed not to see it too.

While I came away feeling a little disappointed that I had let picture taking overtake the project aim somewhat, Mrs Kaur said to me how confident the children were with the cameras. This was the first time we had let them lose with three cameras between them and when she mentioned it I realised how far they had progressed in the last few days. At one point as we were walking through the park a young man asked Sweatha if she would take a picture of him with his girlfriend sitting together under a tree. I think he thought perhaps Sweatha was in charge of the smaller children. She is tall and looked very elegant today in a full length dress (today several of the children had joined the ‘dress competition’), and she immediately responded by taking the camera from him and preparing to take the picture very confidently. He then I think realised what he had done and a look of panic came over his face as he saw me behind the children with Mrs Kaur and Shobha. He spoke to me in English and I said it’s ‘Ok, she is an expert’. The smaller children crowded behind her and for one minute I thought they were all going to join the photo but they stood quietly watching Sweatha taking the picture. As we walked away I said I had thought they might all join in the pose and Mrs Cord said she thought someone might have taken a picture of the couple too and later we would wonder who they were. Maybe too someone might have snapped Sweatha taking the picture. But we were all too slow.

Then I realised that Shobha was embarrassed and said this shouldn’t have happened and that it was a ‘development problem’. It was only several days later when I asked her about the incident again that she explained that the couple were cuddling each other for the photo and she felt that the children should not have witnessed this. Again my failure to understand the cultural meaning/significance of my actions in allowing Sweatha to take the picture.

Returning home on the bus through the evening traffic nearly everyone fell asleep, from a mixture of tiredness and air pollution I suspect. For the children it had been a long day as they had been at school all morning. The street scenes are amazing to my Western eyes. The mix of old and new, the small shops and workshops. I saw one that contained just a lathe, next door to someone who had welding gear. I am sure you could get anything fixed here if you had to. Bullock carts and street vendors outside the new Taj Mahal of the HSBC call centre.