It was in the month of March 2011, I got a call from a gentleman, Shobit Arya, saying that he has a publishing house and is publishing a book that has a write-up by Prof. Anil Gupta of IIMA and National Innovation Foundation (NIF) and he wanted to use a couple of photos from my flickr stream of Shodhyatra, the bi-annual walk to share and also discover and document grass-root innovations, by Honey-bee network, a brain-child of Prof Anil Gupta.

I was delighted to contribute a couple of photos for the article by one of my Gurus. Meanwhile, Nandini gupta, editor of Shobit’s publishing house Wisdom Tree, a well-known name in the space of Quality books, started interacting with me about a few more photos apart from Shodhyatra. Finally I was surprised to see about half-a-dozen photos being selected.

I got an invite from Nandini a couple of days ago to the launch of the book, and only then I realized the gravity of the book – The INDIA Idea. When I walked in for the launch of the book by Mr. Ashwini Kumar, an erudite minister of state for science and technology, in the august presence of Dr. M S Swaminathan, first thing I saw the gathering of many brilliant individuals who have done our country proud. I had wonderful interactions with a few of them, learning and gaining by the end of the day. Yes, I played the Dgembe with friends from Delhi Drum Circle too!!

The book is the third in the series of coffee table books published by the Public diplomacy division of Ministry of External Affairs, for spreading the message of The INDIA Idea across the embassies around the world. I am indeed delighted to see foresighted diplomats like Mr Suri, who are making the difference. As Dr. M S Swaminathan quoted Pt. Nehru, “We are a bunch of poor people inhabiting a rich country”, we certainly need ‘richer’ people to promote our rich country. We need more such diplomats and bureaucrats to make the difference to our MOTHER INDIA.

I shot a few photos of the evening, including the pages of the book that I had my photos, only to find when I reached home, the Memory card of my camera crashing. I could not retrieve any photos. Thanks to Nandini’s mail she sent across with the pdf of the pages that I discovered a couple of hours ago, my compelling desire to blog this very night is coming to an end. After all the hours I spent trying to retrieve the photos, this is welcome end.

But, what stuck me in all this is, ‘passion paves the way’. All people who have contributed to the book are very passionate about their work and have contributed immensely to our nation. Yes, my small contribution to the book is a few photos. I feel good about it.

Even in this context, my passion of capturing the precious moments wherever I travel and documenting my work to some extent on the web and disk (need to be more organized though), has been rewarding in every sense. Over the years my body of work has been contributing to quite a few publications, within our organizations and elsewhere too – including tourism ministries a couple of countries, calendars, travel websites, book publishers around the world have been seeking photos etc. I am delighted about my work and my small contributions.

Yes, passion paves the way and it pays too, in quite a few ways.

Love,
sreeni
sreeni@iwsb.in