Out Clubbing

Last night, I met Manjula and her husband, D. Krishnan, at the Madras Boat Club, founded in 1867 on the Adyar River. It's an old-school kind of place: Sleek rowing sculls kept under shelter, cricket on TV, friends sending drinks to friends across the bar and Diwali fireworks bursting over the water. 

Krishnan, a photographer, has worked for many years at The Hindu, where he now a photo editor, although he occasionally escapes to remote parts of the country to document lives and traditions that haven't given way to the "New India." He also owns an amazing collection of glass negatives of Chennai when it was Madras from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.. I've spotted prints made from these negatives all over town, including the B&B where I'm staying. 

Here is one of the prints from Krishnan's collection:

And, here is Krishnan's great shot for The Hindu of Ben Johnson not winning the 100 meter race at the 1988 Seoul Olympics:

Twenty-four years later, Krishnan wrote about that photo for The Hindu op-ed page. Here's a snippet: 

The feeling that you get on carefully checking your film when it is still wet and finding that you have got the image that you had planned for gives you a thrill that is not experienced when shooting digital. Yes! I had what I had wanted! Johnson with his right hand up in a sign of victory and Carl Lewis following. I couldn’t wait to make a print and transmit it to my newspaper.