|
“I was following the sounds of gunfire when I heard a low-pitched chant of Bismillah… Bismillah… Bismillah,” says Mumbai Mirror photographer Rana Chakraborty as he recalls arriving on the scene of the 2008 siege by gunmen the center of Mumbai.
“I turned to the source of the chant and saw a man sitting with his back to the pavement fencing. On his lap was another man who had been hit by grenade splinters. He was bleeding from the head.”
“Bullets were flying all around, grenades were being hurled and there were sounds of explosions everywhere, but this young man seemed to shut everything out and had taken refuge in some higher power."
“This man was murmuring Bismillah…Bismillah, invoking the same lord in whose name the terrorists were firing indiscriminately at innocents. He should have been lying flat on the ground, as advised by the police. Instead, he chose to comfort an injured man, offering his lap to rest his bleeding head.”
“It was a story that needed to be documented, that needed telling,” continues 38-year-old Rana. “A story that inspired me to capture similar scenes that might be missed in pursuit of the real action."
The award-winning photographer, who has exhibited at home and abroad, found that when he arrived at the Mumbai Chhatrapati Sivaji Terminus he had insufficient battery power for his Nikon D200 and D300 cameras so went back to his office.
By the time he returned and then traveled between the four sites of the siege, he decided to take a different approach from his colleagues who had been recording the start of the violence.
“The terror attack lasted for more almost 60 hours keeping India’s commercial capital at gunpoint,” says Rana. “None of the pictures I took were published immediately as they didn’t fall into the conventional terror-photo category. But it did not deter my resolve. I continue to believe that terror attack coverage is more than just mutilated bodies and never-before-seen gore.”
|
|
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
