In 2017, six years after retiring as editor of Smithsonian magazine, my wife Jane and I returned to India for my third and her second time. By then Delhi was so wracked by air pollution that we reserved only a single night in the airport hotel before flying out the next morning to Jaipur, which had so captivated us six years earlier.

I spent my first morning there by walking around the neighborhood, loosening up my shutter finger. Fortunately there were enough animals and children willing to face a camera without flinching until I got the hang of it.

I hadn’t been perambulating very long when a gentleman I’d seen watching me from a second floor veranda walked up to me and asked if I would take his picture. But of course!

At the Galtaji (Monkey Temple) complex I snapped a man in the universal phone conversation posture. I would like to think he was closing a multi-million dollar deal and not just ordering dal baati churma or some other Rajastahn delicacy for dinner.

Amritsar

Amritsar, our next destination in the north of India, is the holiest city of Sikhism, and the Golden Temple is its premiere spiritual site, rivaling the Taj Mahal as a destination for the faithful and an attraction for travelers. The Temple is also said to be the world’s largest free kitchen, feeding from 50,000 to 100,000 people a day, open 24/7. That’s a lot of chapatis!

Jodhpur

With a population approaching two million, the city of Jodhpur is the second largest in Rajasthan (after Jaipur), situated in the middle of the Thar desert. The leading theory as to why so much of the city is painted blue is the belief, now discredited, that the color offers some protection against Jodhpur’s desert heat, which can exceed 100 degrees in summer.

Pushkar

Our last stop on our 2017 visit was to the annual camel fair in Pushkar, another of the holiest cities in India.

2024

Kolkata and Varanasi

After our 2017 trip, I assumed, at age 76, I would never see India again. But when Jane and I learned that our friends Jon and Kem Sawyer planned to mark Jon’s retirement as president of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting with a six-week trip to India, I invited myself and Jane to join them for part of it—an invitation that was met with enthusiasm, feigned or genuine. We would spend four days in Kolkata and four in Varanasi. Though it was a long way to go for such a relatively short time, it allowed us to renew our friendship with the Sawyers and, not incidentally, led to two pieces in this magazine: “Four Days in Kolkata” in the April, 2025 issue and “Fresh-Eyed Varanasi” in July, 2025.

While I’ve tried (and probably failed) to illustrate this reminiscence with only photographs that had not previously appeared in Street Photography Magazine, I had a difficult time finding unpublished pictures from these two most recent stories, probably due to the relatively brief periods we spent in each city. But from my Kolkata take, I finally chose a tableau of a street barber giving his client a shave, a picture I shot from a taxi stopped at a traffic light.

And from my Varanasi shoot I chose a boat-wallah navigating a perilous crossing between vessels, which I’m pleased to report did not end with his falling into the Ganges.

As half-centuries go, this one has been a joy, which my four trips to India have only enhanced. Lessons learned: don’t lament the missed shots. And keep shooting.

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