Over the next weeks, I will focus on snippets of places that I have been. There will be no focus on any one country, the way that I focussed on China. That's because I lived in China for several years, and these are shots of places I have been to.
Most of the time, we shoot pictures of landscapes or monuments. We often forget to shoot street scenes, and these can be as exciting as shooting any monument.
I took these shots one morning, on the main road outside the Shangri-La Hotel in Bangkok. I had gone there for a conference, and had taken my camera. I was itching to do some photography, and I had not done any black and white stuff for a long time. So, there I was, with my humble film camera on the streets of the city.
There is a bustle about the streets, even at seven o'clock in the morning. The shopkeepers, like the handsome and elegant fellow in the above shot, who open their stalls and wait for the first sale of the day. Elsewhere, you see the roadside tea stalls, selling tea and snacks to passers by, to people waiting for their bus, or for people in other stalls.
The lady selling flowers early morning prepares her bunches. A good deal of these flowers seem to be sold to ladies who want to wear them in their hair, or to others for their early morning prayers.
And then, there are those fellows who simply enjoy a good gossip at their stall.
Refreshed after the night's sleep, they return to the footpath, full of energy. The early morning rays seem to give them energy, as they start the routine of the day with energy and cheer.
Ladies, some of them, stay lost in their own world. Waiting for what? I was tempted to ask the lady below, but I was afraid she would scratch my eyes out. There are times when cowardice is the best policy.
However, I sometimes ask myself if the people who return to their stalls sometimes feel fed to the teeth with the sheer tedium of coming back to the same space, day after day, selling the same cheap stuff, to undergo another day of tedious bargaining with tourists who try to squeeze every baht out of them, and then traipse happily off to the Shangri-La to spend 100 USD on a meal without a thought in their heads?
A baht saves, a hundred dollars spent, is a good way to make yourself feel good.
Perhaps, it is just the happiness of returning to the company of their friends, their fellow stall owners, is what drives them. Maybe, just maybe, it is a way to escape the dreariness of their homes.
In the corporate world, we are often given to moaning about our lives. Flying economy is such a horror! We'd like to be pampered in business class, and to be stuffed to the gills with bland, unhealthy airline food. We write tomes on motivation, the desire to achieve, the desire to excel; the endless blah blah of more corporate talk.
I think most of us forget that there is a whole world out there who just struggle to survive, and to make two ends meet.
More on that the next time..
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