Capturing the nostalgia associated with the train travel in India is a crowd-sourced community page on Instagram titled “Window Seat Project” which has been ruling the social media platform for quite some time now. The pictures and their catchy captions will convince you to start travelling by train once again.
With more than 20,000 followers and 654 posts, the community page is a melange of emotions and scenarios, from the endless sea to lush forests and woods, from food vendors to passengers and from railway platforms to the interiors of the train — all captured through the camera. Some of these exquisite pictures are in monochrome while others are in colour.
The story of the Window Seat Project goes like this:
A few years ago when Shanu Babar (whose brainchild the community is) began it as a hobby that gradually turned into something he started caring more about.
A graduate from Pune’s Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Babar is a cinematographer based in Mumbai. He has been associated with multiple television shows like “MasterChef India” and “The Voice and Taste Down Under”, to name a few. But he soon realised that the monotony of sitting and editing had begun to suffocate him and, therefore, he started the “Window Seat Project” as a getaway from his humdrum routine.
Babar had to submit a dissertation as a part of his course. Along with his classmates he went off on a train journey from Pune to Kanyakumari asking a variety of passengers just one question: “What kind of India do you see from the window seat?”
Babar finds Indian Railways “a mixed bag of a plethora of expressions, emotions, and cultures”, something worth exploring. He finds a story in every passenger and likes to take these stories — captured in frames clicked from different angles — to the world through his community.
Planning a railway journey soon? Don’t forget to take a picture and share it on Instagram with the hashtag “windowseatproject”. Till then, keep clicking and happy journey.
With inputs from IANS
