November 24, 2005, Nimaj, Rajasthan, India It was impossible to capture him. His face was topographic, lines etched deep, a storybook of years spent smiling and laughing, toiling and struggling, living under the blazing sun of central Rajasthan. Wende and I were back in India, this time taking our mothers on (what was then) an […]

September 12, 2013, on the banks of the Bhagirathi, Gangotri, Uttarakhand, India "The river is insane," Wende texted via satellite. I was confused: She couldn't know that, at that moment, I was sitting on the bank of a raging Bhagirathi River in the hamlet of Gangotri. Sure, she of course knew I was in India, […]

Years ago, I was wandering with Pete McBride through trash piles on the outskirts of Rishikesh, India. We were filming the final bits of our film Holy (un)Holy River, and had come to the local dump to document the effluvia seeping from it into the nearby, sacred Ganges River. We knew what to expect: a […]

October 8, 2013, Jajmau, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India My eyes watered, nose ran, lungs burned. I wasn’t sick, but I sure felt like it. We’d spent the day wandering through Jajmau, a “suburb” of Kanpur - the Manchester of the East - and touring its tanneries. Lying just south of sprawling Kanpur, Jajmau is the […]