India is a diamond

India is a diamond nested in the heart of the World.

And like every diamond, it can be as pure as the water at the source of the Ganga or as contaminated as the Ganga by the time it reaches Varanasi.

There are many Indias, beyond the cliches you have seen a million times, as many as the people and Gods who inhabit it, as many as the facets of an infinite diamond. Inestimable or worthless, just like every other diamond. After all, a diamond is merely a shiny rock whose value only resides in the eyes of the person who looks at it.

In India, you may live for a hundred years and only know a few of its facets, lost as you are in the maze of your finiteness and the misery of your own small lives.

There is an India of wealthy men who have no interest in eradicating the ancestral poverty that plagues hundreds of millions. And you know why? Because they profit off of it. An Indian man, an educated man I randomly met in a restaurant where we were the only customers and who joined me at my table because it was just too awkward to stare at each other across the huge, empty dining hall, complained to my face about the new stricter child labor laws in Bangladesh. He whined that these laws would increase the price of the counterfeit clothes he imported from there to make an extra buck on top of his fat salary. “It’s a pity they are trying to prevent children from working in these sweatshops. It forces factories to pay women more”.

There is an India of millions of wandering nameless babas. Part beggars, part mystics, part hustlers. Men wearing orange, red or black robes cracking the rotting, flower-scented flesh of the immense country by walk, car, bus, motorcycle, airplane, rickshaw, hitchhiking, moving in every direction like drunk ants on a board game. Visiting all the sacred sites or spending their whole lives in a no-name village under the same tree under which the divinity manifested to them, or simply where life is easier. Most of them living thanks to the generosity of the others, owning nothing but a bowl, a stick and a blanket, smoking weed someone cultivated for them. At the end of the day, they never go hungry even though they probably have no idea where the next meal will come from when they wake up. Sleeping in temples, on sidewalks, under trees or in hotels paid by rich foreign benefactors, at least the most charismatic ones who speak a little English. Some of them are simply men who at some point chose between living as beggars or wearing a robe and acting enlightened to make a living off the devotion of others. Some of them live on the fat baksheesh paid by travel photographers who pay them to pose for cliche photos because they have a look that is Instagram-friendly. Some of them are Gods incarnated or speak daily to the millions of elephant-headed, monkey-headed, blue-skinned, flute-playing Gods.

In these images, there is an India with nearly no human presence. Silent, suspended. No children, no soulful wise men or beautiful ladies in sarees. This is an India in which the presence of Man or even God can be barely perceived. It's just one of the thousands of facets of this incredible country.

In India there is everything, there is nothing and all that is in between.