Ageless Mind and Spirit - India

A 2-member photographer-filmmaker team researched, interviewed, and photographed 400 elderly people. The book that emerged, Ageless Mind and Spirit: Faces and Voices from the World of India's Elderly, features elderly people telling stories in their own voice. Although some of these people are famous or accomplished, many are ordinary people commenting on what it means to be elderly in India. Each story is accompanied by a large-format environmental photographic portrait of the person and a biographical note.

Featuring unknown people and inviting them to speak in their own voices are strategies designed to highlight human connections and concerns that are universal - even when expressed by people who may be from very different backgrounds than the reader. For example, ageing can be greeted with optimism - as one featured woman puts it, "the years are like sugar in your tea cup. The last sip is sweetest" - or pessimism - as a traditional toy maker puts it, "what is a long life worth for those with limited means?" A Chinese newspaper publisher living in India feels that the motto of the young is, "go for the cupboard keys first, then just say bye-bye." One featured elderly man is an eye surgeon who has spent his life traveling to far-removed places that have no hospitals to treat people for free. Accompanying his photo are the words: "I am just an ordinary man and will serve as God wants me to. My instruments are my prayer and the operating room is my temple. My work has therefore been my pilgrimage."

Work from this book has been presented in a variety of forums including a traveling exhibition funded by the United Nations.

Ageing.

The author describes the background and significance of his work as follows: "The genesis of this project lies in my work with numerous non-profit and development oriented projects and organizations in India and overseas. While I have had an opportunity to work on [diverse] issues...what often struck me is the subservience of photography to the research, copy and other elements in the communication pieces that emerged at the end of our combined efforts. As a photographer, I wished for projects where photography drives every other element...An equal concern was that while serious issues were worked upon and hotly debated by the specialists working on them in different capacities, often little of this work or debate went out to the general public, especially in an engaging form. This project was an attempt to address one such serious issue using this approach.