Last week, the Mumbai Railway Police launched an annual calendar with images of its men and women at work. According to Railway Commissioner Niket Kaushik, the calendar is an attempt “to show the human face of the railway cops who, as part of their duty, connect with lakhs of commuters on a day-to-day basis.” It is also meant to communicate to the personnel themselves, to instil pride in their work.
To get the right person for the job, he didn’t have to look far. He got in touch with Pravin Talan, a successful commercial and fashion photographer for most months in a year. But for the last eight or nine years, in the few weeks he takes a break from the bread-and-butter work, he takes his camera outdoors and shoot images of the various forces that protect citizens every day. “In between work I used to do a project every year that focused on themes like freedom and patriotism,” he says, “playing around with images featuring the Indian flag for instance.”
Intending merely to post these pictures online, he went off and shot the Indian Army in the northeast and then the Indian Air Force. He then started getting contacted by other forces, and as he began interacting more with the uniformed folk, he realised that the role these images could play in their perception by the public.
Creating an image
Why wasn’t something like this done before? “Commercial photographers like myself come with a certain price, and many of these organisations don’t have that kind of budget, whether you think of any of the paramilitary forces or organisations like the railway police. They just don’t have the pictures that do justice to their work.”
He wants India’s forces to be seen in the same way that citizens of other countries do, “Every country releases four or five images a year of their armed forces. The U.S. releases pictures of the Navy Seals and the drills that they do. As does France, China, South Korea of all their various forces. It should be like that for all our personnel.”
Over the last few years, Mr. Talan has shot images for organisations as diverse as the Agra police, National Security Guard (a soon-to-be released calendar features shots of the training drills commandos go through), the Border Security Force, the 1090 women’s force in Uttar Pradesh, the Mumbai Police (their calendar was launched a month ago) and various district level commando units.
Part of his agenda is to show how these forces have evolved over the years. “When the 26/11 bombings happened for instance, the images that were stuck in people’s minds were that the police were ill-equipped and lacked coordination to deal with such an attack. In the years that followed that has changed. Every organisation is stronger, more sophisticated, better equipped. Somebody needs to tell citizens that is what we are now and we should feel great about them.” He speaks of the Mumbai Police as an example. “There is a new generation of IPS officers who are tech-savvy, sophisticated, and fit. When you have those kinds of people leading it filters down into the forces.”
About the Railway Police calendar he says, “When you travel in the train and you see a policeman standing there, you don’t know that he’s not a city cop. There is no story or article about him, no reference for what he really does, the day to day interaction with people.”
Mr. Talan’s dream is to make available over a thousand downloadable wallpapers of what he calls the ‘incredible Indian forces’.
