| When the Kosi Turns When Dan Church Aid sent me to Bihar to cover the Kosi flood two months after the actual breach had occurred, I thought I was going to cover an aftermath story. I was wrong. I remember my first day, driving past the bustling chaos of Saharsa town, which opened into vast paddy fields and a pot holed highway to Madhepura. Not far ahead, makeshift camps for the displaced, lined both sides of the highway. We drove for hours, the sight of wind-battered tarpaulin sheets covering the makeshift huts accompanied us the whole while. The disaster caused by Kosi floods was all about scale, expanse and numbers and it took a while for everything to sink in. Every time I took a picture with my 28mm lens, I looked up and then looked around. I was capturing about a quarter of what was in front of me. It didn’t feel right. I was trying to tell a visual story about modern India’s worst ever flood and I felt, with one frame, I would end up telling a quarter of the story. Since there were no vantage points to shoot overviews from, I somehow had to improvise and do justice to the situation. On the morning of the third day I decided to take my first panoramic photo. It was at a government camp in Bhimnagar, located on an embankment and not far from the point of breach. I requested the sixty odd people who were present there to form a line in front of their tents and asked them to hold still for a minute. That evening, back at the hotel when I stitched those nine frames together, it didn’t look perfect, there were flaws but the idea had potential. On the ground, panoramic was probably the best format to depict the magnitude of the situation in Bihar. By Sumit Dayal |
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