Rahul Jacob, Leisure Editor of Financial Times, was in Delhi recently to attend a wedding where three of the world’s most eminent photojournalists — James Nachtwey, Raghu Rai and Sebastião Salgado — were also guests. The fourth, Bob Nickelsberg, on his way to Afghanistan, was most likely standing at the bar. He can’t get Old Monk rum in New York. Here’s Rahul’s take in FT:
James Nachtwey, Raghu Rai and Sebastião Salgado in Delhi at the wedding of the son of a friend and former colleague Deepak Puri (second from left).
A couple of Saturdays ago in New Delhi, I had briefly dozed off as a performance by chanting Buddhist nuns drew to a close. Then, the lights in the auditorium had been dimmed and in the near darkness only the outlines of the flowing robes of the group on stage were visible. One member wore a kind of white wizard’s hat, another a close-fitting black outfit with a skullcap. A Syrian Sufi group, they both looked completely foreign and yet oddly familiar. When the lights went back on, and the lead singer started singing with the lusty enthusiasm of the late Pakistani star Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, I realised the austere, slim man wearing a black skullcap was a Swiss convert to Islam whose home in Aleppo I had visited some months ago. There I had seen photographs of the Al-Kindi Ensemble decorating the walls.
Coincidence? Perhaps, but after a few of such occurrences, I felt that the world really was shrinking and that New Delhi, perhaps the most staunchly individualistic of major capitals, was becoming part of the global village. The term has become shorthand for a contradictory cosmopolitanism, evoking both a smaller world and McDonald’s arches, duty-free arcades and foreign cars. In Delhi, even a decade ago, these mercantile markers were much less common than in other Asian capitals. Alighting at the government-run airport in Delhi, you used to walk into a nightmare that might have been straight out of Salman Rushdie’s novels: a rugby scrum at baggage claim as porters arbitrarily grabbed suitcases in case the overloaded belt broke down; filthy toilets with overflowing urinals; queues at immigration so long that the arrivals hall looked like a refugee camp. Now, the privatised Delhi airport could be in another country.
Click here to watch James Nachtwey’s presentation at TED. It’s an incredibly moving story.
