Partha Misra
I grew up in the coastal town of Puri in eastern India, where the Bay of Bengal crashes against ancient temple walls, and the air smells of salt, marigolds, and something older than both. It's the kind of place that gets into you quietly and never quite leaves. I think it's where my curiosity was born — and where it learnt it had no intention of sitting still.
Seneca warned, 'He who is everywhere is nowhere.' I have spent a considerable amount of my life proving him right, and I regret nothing. The list of places is long; what survives of them is never the itinerary but a handful of mornings I could not have planned and cannot now put in order.
The truest version of me is standing at the edge of a jungle at dawn, camera in hand, waiting for the light to shift. You sit still long enough that the forest forgets you're there and resumes being itself. Most days nothing happens. That's the arrangement.
The rest of the time I'm reading — the old ones, mostly, and not for answers. Someone has always been there before you: as glad, as unhappy, as curious about the whole of it — and better at saying so than I will ever be.
What ties it together, if anything does? The interesting things don't announce themselves. Not in a forest, not in a book. They reveal themselves to whoever was willing to sit there long enough, paying attention, without a plan for what to do with them.
Glad you found your way here.
