Ghost

‘One should not go to the dry pond as it is believed to be the home for ghosts.’

Inspired by the local saying from the villages around my hometown in Chhattisgarh, the series explores the environment through a fictional depiction of an imagined ghost.

During the last summer that I spent at my native place, I came across numerous ponds that were completely dried. The saying which I had heard long before, was reminded of again by a local friend and it grew inside as I kept seeing signs of something haunting. I walked into a particular pond where there were shells dispersed over the cracked soil, shimmering around a concrete structure that stood tall as if it had become mortal, an eerie silence surrounded the place. It felt as if I had sensed the ghost, in between the melancholy of crisis and death of an ecology.

Initially started as a search for sacred connections between human & nature, the work rather discovers the lack of it. Through different shades of thirst, hunger, fear, uncertainty and death, all that are parts of a crisis, it aims to evoke the presence of a ghost.

Like myths and folklores which encompass the ideas about environment, the saying questions the bond between human & nature while addressing the connections that are barely visible.