Karena Perronet-Miller

Station to Station  28 of 42 / View all

As a seasoned guest in this marvellous Indian continent, I still find India a baffling and glorious enigma. India is as vast as it is crowded, as luxurious as it is squalid. Nothing is ever quite the way you expect it to be. What seems an illusion is reality and curiously intoxicating and toxic at the same time.

Suffocating bureaucracy thrives and seems to have been a legacy of bygone times and the British in India. Common sense seems to be deficient, on the other hand bountiful portions of buffoonery and chaos thrive and miraculously get processed, detangle and transformed into a sense of order. Perhaps the most triumphant legacy from those "Rule Britannia" days has to be the remarkable railway network. Railways were first introduced to India in 1853. Once established they became a lifeline for trade, economy and people. Approximately 40,000 miles plus of tracks connect millions of lives. The railways traverse the length and width of this vast country bringing near the far. Whole communities live, work and love between the tracks.

I have spent weeks in Indian railway stations over the years, endlessly waiting on platforms, feeling filthy, grumpy, dehydrated. Never far from the all pervasive fog of body odour artfully blended with alluring spices from the tiffin boxes and incense. This gallery records everyday life on the tracks in one station over a period of 7 weeks.

I grew to love and admire this amazing community of people that dwell in and around this railway station. Sadly, In the last 10 years Indian railways have been digitally transformed and that magical sense of bygone transportation is fading fast.