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Photo Essay – In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

Rest in sleep.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

It is almost midnight. He is lying sprawled on the road divider. He seems to be sleeping. His eyes are closed. The headlights of a speeding car fall on his figure, illuminating him momentarily. The car goes away; the man is again plunged into the city’s incomplete darkness.

This is a scene on south Delhi’s Aurobindo Marg. The sight of this man on this spot in the city is unique because, after all, each of us has an individual identity. It is a part of basic courtesy to emphasize the exclusiveness of this anonymous person.

Having said that, The Delhi Walla confesses that most of the times the homeless people sleeping on the pavements look the same from a car window. They are noticed only when some car driver loses control and a sleeping body come under the tyres. On a recent early morning, four homeless men sleeping on a pavement in north Delhi’s Yamuna Bazaar came under a car being driven by a school student.

One of the men died. He had no identity documents with him, so his name is still not known. We don’t know his biography. He might have migrated to the city from a faraway town or village. To his family, if he had a family, he is still alive.

The ever onward nature of the news cycle will ensure that the ‘nameless’ man will soon be buried under other headlines and tweets. The city will forget the sleeping bodies of its pavements until the next out-of-control car.

I, however, often walk the streets of Delhi at night (and day), actively trying to see our city’s invisible people sleeping on the pavements. This photo essay is in memory of the nameless man who died.

To the man who remains nameless to us

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

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Photo Essay - In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

4 thoughts on “Photo Essay – In Memory of the Nameless Homeless Man Who Died, Around City Pavements

  1. “Say this city has ten million souls,
    Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:”

  2. Are you saying that one’s NOT supposed to look away or ignore them? How weird! Now this would really go against all the fine values one is taught to cherish as a darling little bourgeois child/adolescent. Solid, time-honored values like ‘they’re poor for a reason’ , ‘they’re a bunch of addicts’ and ‘it’s their qismet, beta’ help keep the quotidian pangs of conscience at bay. One can’t afford to lose sleep over such bagatelles! One is sure that god will come to their rescue as usual.

  3. Thank you for sensitizing….next time when we bypass a huddled figure we will at least think of that ‘mass of cloth/plastic sheet’ as human being….and not block our senses

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