Flex Mentallo

The stations team with travelers, porters, hawkers and beggars - not to mention the occasional ferangi (foreigner).

Stations The railways are the the circulation system of India, indeed it's life blood. Purnabha, (and sometimes) Lucina and I traveled up and down the Eastern railways line from the far north to the south of India several times in a relatively short time, so we spent a lot of time on trains and waiting at stations. On my first day, traveling south from Kolkata to Bubaneshwar with Purnabha to meet Lucina there, our train was delayed for four hours. The temperature in the station was 38 degrees, but worse, the humidity made it feel like a sauna, so the 'realfeel' would have added five degrees to that.

“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.” – Buddha

Conscience

It's easy enough to point and shoot, only you have to own the responsibility. Even if you think you are doing it for good reasons, can you ever truly be sure?

The challenge it raises for me is not whether compassion, nor empathy, but conscience.

Hari Adivarekar, an Indian photojournalist wrote: "This is poor journalism and even poorer humanity. "Too many have come and done this kind of shameful work in India and their rewards just open the door for many others to think it’s ok. It isn’t. It’s just inexcusable."

After returning home I read a newspaper article about a photographer who had conceived a project about food in India. Italian photographer Alessio Mamo photographed Indian children in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in front of ‘fake food’ and asked them to cover their eyes. The photos, part of a series called Dreaming Food, were taken in 2011, but given a new lease of life after the World Press Photo Foundation – boasting almost one million followers – featured them on its Instagram page.

Perhaps the worst of it is that the tea plantation owners are so powerful they can bribe anyone, right up to ministerial level. [There is an ex-minister in prison right now, but his ill-gotten gains have not been confiscated, and those who bribed him remain untouchable.]

They have built their primitive homes on Government land. but the homes are devoid of possessions.

Trapped in a cycle, the villagers don't earn enough from tea picking to feed their families, so they borrow from loan sharks, and never escape the debts. And this might simply be to buy garden tools to grow a few vegetables.

Apart from a handful of NGOs, very little is done to assist such communities. The police are all to often bought off by the traffickers. No one seems to care about the poverty, the diseases.

It alters your perspective, doesn't it, such knowledge? There is a recent case of two innocent tourists who got lost in the cloud forests of Assam and were mistaken for traffickers known to be operating there. The hapless tourists were set upon by angry villagers and killed.

Even for them, the heat and humidity of the season are hard to endure. These girls are heading out to a bridge over a broad river bed where cooling breezes offer some relief, and they can chat amongst themselves. But outside the village is precisely where they are most at risk of abduction from traffickers who pull them into cars and are typically outside the district before any response can be mounted.

Bu the awful fact is that girls and boys are regularly abducted and sold to brothels as far away as New Delhi.

Emotive pictures of village children are all very well.