Faces And Places
Deepak Nayyar
This book brings together a selection of the author's photographs that have been taken over the past four decades. Some go back even longer in time. It is a book of pictures, in terms of attractive visuals for the reader to be engaged, simply by turning the pages but not quite in a conventional sense. These photographs are about the world around us. In fact, its title captures the essential idea of its dual theme. The focus is on people in their daily lives and on places that are of interest to visitors. There are photographs of people, which depict life in its ordinary, engaging, striking or even amusing dimensions. There are photographs of places, which range from the beautiful and exquisite to the stark and the awesome. The pictures are not from India alone but from countries across the world. This geographical spread, juxtaposed with human diversity across continents in space, is perhaps an attribute that makes this collection different from most others. Both the similarities and the differences are fascinating.
Deepak Nayyar, an eminent economist, is Professor Emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Photography has been a hobby and a passion for more than 50 years, ever since he got his first primitive box camera in 1958 when he was not quite 12 years old. In an academic career spanning four decades, Professor Nayyar taught Economics at the University of Oxford, the University of Sussex, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and the New School for Social Research, New York. His professional life in academia has been interspersed with time in the world of public policy, including as Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and Secretary in the Ministry of Finance. He also served as Vice Chancellor of the University of Delhi from 2000 to 2005. Professor Nayyar was educated at St. Stephen's College and the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Thereafter, as a Rhodes Scholar, he went on to study at Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he obtained a D.Phil in Economics. He has published 14 books as an academic. This is his first book outside the domain of Economics. He hopes there will be more.