Celebrating a century.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The year 2013 was special. The Delhi Walla finished reading all the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s wildly entertaining novel In Search of Lost Time.

2013 was also the centenary year of Swann’s Way, the book’s first volume, which was published in Paris in 1913.

To celebrate the hundred years of Lost Time, I took portraits of one hundred Delhiwallas, and they all posed after Marcel’s famous photo taken around 1900 by photographer H. Martinie.

Not all the women and men who so graciously agreed to my request to be photographed traced the exact gestures of our beloved writer – the asthmatic novelist had his delicate hand gracefully supporting his cheek. But I hope that the face of each of these hundred people inspires a vision that – in Proust’s words – “appeals not to our eyes only but requires a deeper kind of perception and takes possession of the whole of our being.”

In 2014 I resolve to re-read Lost Time.

Delhi’s hundred Prousts

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Me too (This photo is by Pradeep Gaur)