I started doing this about 15 years ago. Traveling to India is all at once, mind-bending, inspiring, discomforting, puzzling, exhausting, eye-opening, depressing and exciting.
It's hard to escape both the exoticism and the clichés. You find yourself slipping into many roles: the concerned traveler, the curious onlooker, the older white Swiss-European guy, the well-read know-it-all, or the naive “wow” person.
The Travelogue is a way of exploring India. But also a way to explore my perception of things. In this, I owe more to artist-photographers like Raghubir Singh, Gauri Gill, Dayanita Singh, and Peter Bialobrzeski than to painters.
Travelling through an informal world: Some 86% of workers in the Indian economy are informal - without written contracts, paid leave or other benefits - making it the largest informal workforce in the world. The term 'informal economy' is both a fact and a metaphor. Informal work adapts to circumstances, much like artistic expression.
