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People of the floating world: they live off the map, on sandbar islands that rise and fall with seasons. On shifting lands they plough shifting sands, not knowing if the next flood will displace them. It's not new, the floods: they're used to them, they k
Arati Kumar-Rao:
A fisherman's son. #bangladesh #sundarbans #monsoon #mangrove #hilsa #onassignment Shot with the #dslr for #riverdiaries
Arati Kumar-Rao:
... I remember touching the lifeless cetacean. It had felt smooth, almost like the flipper-rubber of a scuba diver. Smooth and cold with white chalk like gashes on its back and fins - scars from fighting the net. Its eyes - they were so very small. Thes
Arati Kumar-Rao:
The mighty Meghna - Padma confluence is one of the chief #hilsa landing sites. Daily wage workers scurried up the cliff and down to moored boats with small batches of hilsa and heavy loads of ice. The fish would be packed on board and then shipped to Dhak
Arati Kumar-Rao:
The toughest moment for me in #riverdiaries so far came yesterday. You read words in a paper "dolphins get caught in nets" You see photographs of entanglement captioned "a death trap for dolphins" Your fingers run over a cold smooth immobile baby - its n
Arati Kumar-Rao:
Under dramatic late monsoon skies, a cry rings out from our boat in bengali... How has it been? Caught them fish? They yell back with hands gesturing... Nothing. "Bad season. No fish in the river!" We are yet to meet a different story. #onassignment #ri
Arati Kumar-Rao:
Father, deeper, scarcer: #riverdiaries This hilsa fisherman is back in Khulna after seven days on the high seas. The five year-old trawler has another three years of life left in it, to recover the investment. But the future looks less than stellar. They
Arati Kumar-Rao:
Elsewhere We watched another #hilsa fisherman pull up a net that had been sitting across the width of the Sela river in the #sundarbans for 6 hours. They pulled and pulled. And pulled up one ilish maachch weighing about 1kg or so. In the whole month, they
Arati Kumar-Rao:
It is about 8pm and the season thus far weighs heavily on the crew of this seagoing hilsa fishing trawler. Two full days in the Bay of Bengal and they have only 10kgs to show for it. There are 14 of them. Sharing 10kgs will net each less than one hilsa fi
Arati Kumar-Rao:
#riverdiaries: three men on a boat :) #Fishermen on the Turag river that flows through Dhaka. Abundant in fish, it is also heavily polluted, and is the site for the second biggest Islamic gathering after the Hajj, the Bishwa Ijtema. #dhaka #rivers #bang
Arati Kumar-Rao:
#Riverdiaries: Northernmost tip of #Dhaka, atop the Turag #river. Polluted, lined with shanties, thick with boats, rich with fish. We barely reached the bridge and .... Plop! A huge river dolphin :) Adaptable is their middle name, maybe? #onassignment #b
Arati Kumar-Rao:
Seen on an open wetland along the Brahmaputra. Maguri Beel, embraced by an arm of the Brahmaputra, is rich spawning ground for fish, opens out into dolphin habitat, and is slated to have Oil India rush their liquid wares right under it. #Wetlands #river
Arati Kumar-Rao:
Ode to the humble 'gamosa,' the cloth you see on everyone, everywhere in Assam and in parts of northeast and east india. Some say ga=body and mosa=wipe, a cloth to wipe the body. But it is also more than that, some say, calling it a traditional sacred clo
Arati Kumar-Rao:
The #Brahmaputra is a moody river. The path we used in the morning has changed by the evening. Sandbars now rise where water flowed just hours prior. What was deep is now shallow. What was shallow is now deep. With this river, nothing is as it was or as i
Arati Kumar-Rao:
Back home for a bit, to a #Bangalore doused in #monsoon2014 :)
Arati Kumar-Rao:
This boat master repaired fishing nets when he was not reading the waters. His cabin was full of nets of varying types; his personal effects included net shuttles, twine, eye glass case, beedis, match box, and cell phone. When we docked he would go fishin
Arati Kumar-Rao:
"It has not rained like it used to for two years now," the locals said of the scant monsoons near Dibrugarh. As i flew south-west to lower Assam, it was a different story. #monsoon2014 had been harsh, there had been landslides, flooding, displacement. Fro
