By Mihir Srivastava
Bandeep Singh is India’s most celebrated news photographer.
If he’s shot your portrait you have arrived in life. He captures the best in people. Paradox it is, we can see all around us but ourselves. Chirag tale andhera. Bandeep not just illuminates people to see themselves clearly but, more often than not, they fall in love with their own image. This is the power of Bandeep’s photography.
There’s a group of photographers who swear by him and his work and there’s another set, who criticise him for being too good like a dense tree under which no grass grows. Much like many singers cribbed about Lata Mangeshkar’s overwhelming presence, some construed it as her dominance. Either way, the photo-journalist fraternity acknowledges Bandeep as the photographer of our generation.
That’s how the world knows him. But he’s much more than a photographer. Firstly, an artist. Significantly, a good man. And the nature of his goodness is very pleasant and few friends, like me, have had the privilege of experiencing Bandeep in his elements.
The core of Bandeep is a family man and a ‘Sufi’ too. His wife Pallavi and son Baahu are his pillars of strength. They make a beautiful family. His way to connect with the world is the divine adhesive called love. He‘s excited about what life has to offer in the way it has to offer. And romanticism with life is his fodder for creativity.
Bandeep is interested and that makes him curious. And his investigation is not confined to knowing a thing, but experiencing it in some measure.
Bandeep has a busy job that can get demanding at times, but he finds time for things he loves to do. And he’s a good example of the fact that no one is really busy, it’s just a question of priorities. It's a priority to explore life in all its manifestation. Bandeep works hard because he loves what he does.
Painting is one of them. The brisk brush-stroke on the hand-woven paper lends itself to a language. And it transcends the boundary of calligraphy and abstract. Like life, amorphous and ambiguous, any attempt to be categorical about things is to confine them. It can be many things at the same time, with varied interpretations. It has a lot to do with the witness, not just art. But to me, his thing is the force of the brushwork. Sometimes he knows what he is trying to do, when he doesn’t he is driven by pure creativity.
Being a foodie is also in the realm of his artistic association with the world. His tongue can decipher favours like a ground-penetrating radar detects landmines. And, logically so, he's a connoisseur of tea. He likes to sample exotic teas with a friend by his side, more often than not, the friend is oblivious to the subtleness of flavours and aroma. It’s not easy to please him. And when he’s pleased then there are very few who celebrate food like he does.
At one level, Bandeep is driven by this insatiable energy to explore and reinvent himself by challenging himself in novel ways. At another level, there’s vulnerability too. He’s forthright about it.
To me his greatest quality is that he can empathise with the people he interacts with. Can dig beneath the surface and see the hidden. Like in his pictures, he makes people look good because he’s focused on the positives, for he’s not well equipped to deal with the bad in others. And sometimes when he tries to engage with it when it’s unavoidable, he’s miserable till he gets back to his usual self.
He’s perhaps the only photographer who can easily make top writers insecure. So many stories are read because they are accompanied by Bandeep’s pictures. And more often than not, writing cannot match the pictures. Many of his pictures are etched in our memories as the defining moments of our times. Baba Ramdev’s cover image of India Today is just one of many. And there’s hardly a celebrity, or a politician of any significance who has not been captured by Bandeep’s camera.
It might get a bit frustrating up there. There are not enough people who’d appreciate the nuances of his pictures, the brushwork in his paintings, the soaking of the ink on the sur-face of paper, much like the subtle aroma and flavour of an exotic tea.
He connects to the essence of the people and things and fruits and vegetables, and meat. Though he's not much of a drinker, he knows what it means to be drunk. And being drunk is not to lose the path, go bacchanalian. Like the famous qawwali he plays after the guests are liquored up, Kambakht tune pi hi nahi hai…(miserable you, you aren't drunk!!) The drunkenness this qawwali refers to is that entanglement that annihilates ego when you forget your own for the other and that becomes you, it could be a person or an activity, nature or just mere solitude. That’s love. In that sense, he’s a lover.
And he loves to translate qawwali for friends, word by word, narrating the mood and the essence and the emotion and the message. He enters the soul of the poet, that is the best way to appreciate poetry. And understanding a thing is like experiencing it. He opens doors for his friends. Needless to add, his knowledge of the Urdu language and understanding of poetry–the cultural contexts in which it was written and its universal appeal–can easily make a monkey out of a maulvi.
He can see what others can't and can make people see what he saw in the first place by way of his pictures. And I have a lurking suspicion that the cosmos poses for him. As he has this uncanny habit to be at the right place at the right time. Or is it the uncanny ability to make his time with the subject the perfect time to be together as is unmistakably reflected in his pictures!
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