In the last six months, a visit to Nepal in November 2025 was the only time I made a deliberate attempt to photograph. But this time it was a different approach to photography – I wasn’t squeezing myself in-between thousands of people photographing for a project. I didn’t want to photograph because I was a ‘photographer’ but because I wanted to slow down and enjoy documenting my surroundings.
To ‘enjoy’ photography is something you tend to forget at times. You forget you started because you enjoyed what you could do with a camera. You enjoyed observing, having conversations, consciously going through photographs and curating them and making prints. Sometimes the seriousness takes over and you think you must photograph to ‘make sense’. The joy of looking through the viewfinder forgotten in the process.
Also forgotten is the importance of being in the moment – photography is not the only reason why you travelled all the way to a remote place. It was to enjoy the process of hopping on a small, crowded bus with goats and chickens and reaching where you would have not bothered to reach if it wasn’t for your curiosity. It was also to look within and have some realisations about yourself. The joy of being welcomed by strangers like a family, the joy of observing their life, dining with them, singing and dancing with them, gulping down a few glasses of a drink you don’t know anything about – the joy of it all together is why it all began.
So it wasn’t surprising I didn’t feel like photographing at all for months – the disconnect was bound to occur so that I could go back to why I started. It’s a reminder that to slow down and enjoy the process is why I travel and photograph.
Everything else can wait.
