This pair at a market in Mumbai, India struck me with their immense contrast. A man and a woman. Young and old. Western clothes and eastern attire. Buyer and seller. But mostly a towering giant and a fragile Lilliputian.<\/p>\n
A friend of mine remarked that scenes like this are why she won’t visit India. It’s just too sad. But is it? I’m not sure I know.<\/p>\n
Without any evidence, I felt that I had more in common with the man. So I wondered about the woman: Who was she? What stories could she tell me? Was she happy? Did she wonder about me?<\/p>\n
Again without any evidence, I thought it would be better to be the man here than the woman. But would it really?<\/p>\n
Which would you rather be?<\/p>\n
\n
The background to the photo is this: I was wandering around Mumbai on my first visit to India, battling the heat (even in winter); basking in the pulsing, contagious energy; and joining the frenetic mix of people and animals and vehicles. I spotted this woman in a marketplace. She was so apparently fragile, so apparently at odds with what I expected, that I was reluctant to approach her, and even more reluctant to photograph her. I had a real camera with me, but I didn’t want to point the lens at her — perhaps in consideration of her feelings, but more likely because of my own discomfort. So I took this shot on the sly, with my cellphone at my side as I meandered by, hoping she wouldn’t notice me noticing her.<\/p>\n
I wished I could have spoken with her and asked her about her life. Maybe I would have learned if my impression was reflected in her reality. But even without the cultural differences, the language barrier would have been insurmountable. So I was left with just the photo so speak — rightly or wrongly — for itself. And I promised myself that during my next visit I would wander around with a translator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This pair at a market in Mumbai, India struck me with their immense contrast. A man and a woman. Young and old. Western clothes and eastern attire. Buyer and seller. But mostly a towering giant and a fragile Lilliputian. A friend of mine remarked that scenes like this are why she won’t visit India. It’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":73,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,4,6,8,5],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-shorts","tag-happiness","tag-india","tag-inequality","tag-mumbai","tag-poverty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":371,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joelmhoffman.com\/Human-Stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}