Authorsupfront

Indian print edition also available on: Amazon India
International print edition available on: Amazon USA | Amazon UK
eBook edition available on: Amazon Kindle

In April 2021, Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), NITI Aayog, in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched AIM-PRIME (Program for Researchers on Innovation, Market-Readiness and Entrepreneurship). Implemented by the Venture Center, the PRIME programme was aimed at promoting science-based, deep technology ideas to market, through training and guidance over a period of 12 months.

The photographs of the Chin people in this book fill the eye with these dilemmas. As ethnic minorities from Myanmar living in exile in the Indian capital, most of the men, women and children you see in these images have refugee status accorded to them by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and live in unspeakable hardship. But even without any knowledge of their precise circumstances, you can see them suffering from various maladies of the body and mind, perhaps from memories of the home they have been forced to leave behind. Captured in natural light, these images seem to exude a yellow gloom, conveying the jaundiced mood of the setting. There are pockets of darkness in these photographs, as though a metaphor for their lives. The handful of families represented in this project embody the traumas and tragedies that define the lives of a majority of the Chin community in India.