Natural Habitats

This is another one of my India stories. I'll need to start it with a bit of background, though. Everywhere I went in India, I had my camera ready to shoot. The only problem was, whenever I'd pull out the camera to take a picture of some locals, they'd all stop what they were doing and pose. I wanted to be able to capture true Indian moments while I was there, but couldn't because the locals just had to pose. I ended up resorting to taking pictures when no one was looking, or pretending to be taking a picture of something else just to move my camera towards my intended target at the last minute. Here's a few of those true Indian moments.

We were walking through some other small village somewhere in the state of Punjab. It had just finished raining, so we were trying not to slip on the dirt road that had turned into a mud road (to make matters worse, I was wearing sandals that day. Ugh). As we were about to turn a corner, Jimmy (my cousin, also a Canadian) stopped dead in his tracks, turned to us and whispered, "Stop!".

"Uhh, Jimmy. What's wrong? Why are we whispering?"

"Hurry, take out your camera! I want you to take a picture of that kid in its natural habitat!!"

"Natural habitat??" At this point, I'm trying so hard not to laugh out loud.

"Yes! Hurry before they see us!! Finally, a picture without a pose!! Muhahaaa."

I pulled out my camera and snapped the picture below.

Here is another unposed picture. This is the grandma of the kid above...she was quite the character. She would scream and shout at everyone. She did not notice that I took this picture...I think she's cooking something, although I didn't go close enough to her to find out.

We went to the Rock Garden in Chandigardh, Punjab (Chandigardh is a big city, and the only city in India that reminds me of the Western world). As we were walking through the garden, I saw this lady that works there - she had climbed up high on one of the rock walls and was cleaning up around the rocks. As I was taking pictures around her, I quickly turned to her and snapped this pic.

She saw me take the picture, and started swearing at me!! When I realized how mad she was at me, I started to run. I knew she couldn't jump off the rock and chase me down but I was afraid that she might throw something at me, so I ran to another part of the garden - she kept on swearing until I was out of sight!!

**sigh** It was such a fun trip.