11/07/2026
I was crossing Park Street yesterday afternoon. The traffic was at its most unforgiving. Pedestrians, cars, motorcycles, the usual Kolkata negotiation between urgency and patience. I had my phone in my hand — not because I was shooting, but because I had just finished a call.
Then a yellow Ambassador taxi drifted into the frame and stopped.
Right in front of Trincas.
If you know Kolkata, you understand why that matters. Trincas on Park Street is not simply a restaurant. It is an address that carries decades of the city’s memory — musicians, writers, evening conversations that lasted longer than they should have, a particular quality of Calcutta warmth that only exists in places that have refused to change their personality with every passing decade. And the Ambassador — that round-shouldered, unhurried, yellow machine — is perhaps the most recognisable symbol of this city’s quiet refusal to be hurried by the modern world.
For one brief moment, both were in the same frame. The taxi side-on and completely still. The white columns of Trincas standing behind it. The Park hotel rising above everything. And written on the taxi’s door, in plain black letters, two words that felt like the city speaking directly to the moment:
NO REFUSAL.
I raised my phone and pressed the shutter.
The taxi moved a little later. The moment closed. The city continued. People sometimes look at photographs like this and say: you were lucky.
And they are not entirely wrong. There is luck in the taxi arriving at that precise second. There is luck in the traffic pausing just long enough. There is luck in me being on that side of the road at that particular time.
But luck is only the raw material. It arrives constantly, for everyone, in every city, on every ordinary afternoon. Most of it passes unrecognised.
What turns luck into a photograph is something else entirely. It is the ability to recognise significance in the fraction of a second before it disappears. And that recognition cannot be downloaded on the morning of a shoot. It is the accumulated result of years of looking — until the visual language of a place becomes as natural as breathing.
I have been photographing seriously for many years. Not always with a camera in my hand, but always with the habit of seeing. I have stood in difficult light and learned what it does to surfaces. I have photographed strangers and learned how quickly an expression changes. I have missed more decisive moments than I care to count, and each missed moment quietly taught me something about where to place my attention the next time.
By the time that taxi stopped in front of Trincas, I was not thinking about composition. I was not calculating the light. I was not asking myself whether a phone camera was the right tool. Something I couldn’t name simply moved my hand.
The photograph happened because the looking had already been done. The moment only had to show up. This is what I mean when I say that improvisation is not randomness.
Most people hear the word improvisation and think of making things up — of winging it, of performing without preparation. In photography, as in jazz, as in any discipline where the practitioner works in real time with unpredictable material, improvisation is something closer to the opposite.
It is the freedom that comes specifically from having done the deliberate work of understanding — understanding light, understanding space, understanding the visual grammar of the place you are standing in — until that understanding becomes instinct rather than checklist.
A photographer who arrives at a scene with a fixed shot in mind will often get that shot. But they will frequently miss the better one that appeared unexpectedly in their peripheral vision, because their attention was fully committed to the plan.
I try to arrive prepared in understanding rather than prepared in conclusions. The distinction matters more than it sounds.
Prepared in conclusions means you already know what you are going to photograph before you get there. The location, the light, the composition, the moment — all decided in advance. The shoot becomes an ex*****on, not an encounter.
Prepared in understanding means you know how light works, how people move, how a city breathes at different times of day. You know what makes a frame hold together and what makes it fall apart. You know the difference between a moment that is merely interesting and a moment that is actually true. And then you walk into the situation and let it show you what it is — rather than what you expected it to be.
One approach produces competent photographs. The other occasionally produces something that surprises even the person who made it. Notice what happened between the two frames I made that afternoon.
The first was taken from slightly further back, landscape orientation, while I was still crossing the road — the instinct frame, raw and a little hurried. The second I stepped to the right, switched to portrait, let the building breathe above the taxi, waited for the side-on alignment to settle. The Park sign, the Trincas sign, the Ambassador — stacking cleanly on a single vertical axis. The blue railing at the bottom echoing the taxi’s blue stripe. And the door reading NO REFUSAL, which in that moment felt less like a regulatory notice and more like the city’s own caption for itself.
The first frame captured the recognition. The second captured the understanding following immediately behind it.
That gap — between instinct and understanding, between the first shutter press and the considered one — is where photography actually lives for me. Not in the gear, not in the location, not in the perfect light. In that small, quiet space where experience meets an unplanned moment and something true gets made. This photograph is not technically perfect. It was taken on a phone, in flat afternoon light, on a busy street with no time to set anything up. A photographer working from a checklist might not have taken it at all.
But it has something that many carefully planned photographs don’t. It has the city in it — the actual city, with its unhurried Ambassador and its memory-laden restaurant frontage and its indifferent crowd — caught in an unguarded moment of being entirely itself.
That, for me, is the only thing a photograph really needs to justify its existence.
Not technical perfection. Not the right equipment. Not the ideal light.
Just the truth of a moment, recognised in time, and held. I have never believed that great photography is primarily about equipment, or technique, or even the locations you manage to access. I have seen extraordinary photographs made on phones, in difficult light, in completely ordinary places. And I have seen technically impeccable images that had no life in them whatsoever.
The difference always comes back to the same thing: how honestly the photographer responds to what they actually see rather than what they planned to see.
Formulas produce results. Understanding produces photographs.
The taxi will not return to that exact position. The light will not repeat itself. The particular quality of that afternoon — the traffic, the stillness of that one vehicle in the middle of it all, the accidental poetry of two words on a door — existed once, briefly, and then rearranged itself into something else entirely.
I was crossing the road. I had my phone in my hand.
That is the only formula I have ever trusted.
