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After 26 years in which time he has been hailed as one of the most respected photographers of India, Raghu Rai has ventured into political territory once more. In this stunning new volume he photographs two important Indian leaders, an outgoing PM, Manmohan Singh, and an incoming one, Narendra Modi. Both are photographed amidst the cacophony of their party meetings, but there is a silence at the centre. One is tinged by despair, the other by a sense of overwhelming power. Raghu Rai is a noted photographer who has published 36 books including celebrated ones on Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama.

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.