In this personal essay, photographer Palani Kumar shows how R. Ezhilarasan – the artist who’s brought light and laughter to the lives of countless children in Tamil Nadu – has inspired and shaped his perspective
M. Palani Kumar is Staff Photographer at People's Archive of Rural India. He is interested in documenting the lives of working-class women and marginalised people.
Palani has received the Amplify grant in 2021, and Samyak Drishti and Photo South Asia Grant in 2020. He received the first Dayanita Singh-PARI Documentary Photography Award in 2022. Palani was also the cinematographer of ‘Kakoos' (Toilet), a Tamil-language documentary exposing the practice of manual scavenging in Tamil Nadu.
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Editor
Pratishtha Pandya
Pratishtha Pandya is a Senior Editor at PARI where she leads PARI's creative writing section. She is also a member of the PARIBhasha team and translates and edits stories in Gujarati. Pratishtha is a published poet working in Gujarati and English.
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Photo Editor
Binaifer Bharucha
Binaifer Bharucha is a freelance photographer based in Mumbai, and Photo Editor at the People's Archive of Rural India.