Rath Yatra – Magnesium Photos
Over on Magnesium Photos I have just published a new piece about the Rath Yatra festival in Puri, Orrisa, India.
A huge hindu festival where over a million devotees flock to a small town on the east coast of India every year.
You can see the full piece with some photos I am very proud of , HERE.
(Including the lead picture of this article, which is one of my favorite travel photographs ever)
The video below was not used in the Magnesium photos piece so I am presenting it here, it was shot with my old camera a Nikon 8800, so the quality is not what I am used to now with the full HD of my 5D mk II , but hopefully it gives you some idea of the craziness and scale of the festival.
Even having spent more than 2 years in India, I have almost never been scared there, but my forays into the crowd at Rath Yatra scared the s*%t out of me.
I’ve been to some big concerts before, at Wembley Stadium in England for example, with 80,000 people and felt the excitement, understood the raw power of tens of thousands of people together in the same place, focused on the same thing.
Rath Yatra was really different.
Maybe because it is a religious festival, inspiring the kind of devotion that rock stars would cut off their left testicle to inspire in their fans, or maybe because the number of people was so much larger.
To be in that mass of seething humanity, over a million people, the ‘group mind’ feeling was truely terrifying and humbling.
It remains one of the most awe inspiring things I have ever witnessed or been a part of.
Fantastic piece Adrian, definitely a place to add to my to-visit list…
get a real sense of the ‘crazy’ from the photographs. nicely done. you were very brave ;)