NEON TEMPLES, MASALA MAGGIE & IPHONED MONKS

"Somewhere along the line, despite my thrashing and flailing, and carefully constructed escape routes, despite, and perhaps even because of the fact that I threw my life across three continents before the tender age of twenty- I made a decision to hold on to India. I decided, in the slew of small and slowly adding up choices that we make- whether to pack the Khadi kurta or the Oxford shirt, whether to learn how to cook myself dal, or just some pesto pasta, whether to grapple with Islamic philosophy or curl up with popular atheist arrogance- I decided that I was going to hold on to India.

So, my journey across the country, my Bharat Yatra last summer, was just that- my photographic documentation of India wrestling with its own slew of small and slowly adding up choices- between its flashy modern fixings and its deep religious roots- the portrait of the Buddhist monks on their iPhones, the landscape of the neon painted, fluorescent light-bulbed temple- capturing those moments, and framing this quintessentially Indian and yet universal struggle, was my act and declaration of holding on and letting go and growing up to what all those choices truly mean."

SANA JAVERI KADRI, 2014