My father was a very loving and simple person. His biggest strength was that he connected with people. A father-son relationship is most special, but not the easiest because, for a child, his father is his hero and role model, and so it was with me. He wanted me to be the best at everything, and kept encouraging and pushing me. This led to differences as we both had high expectations from the other. But we loved each other dearly. No one could replace what my father was to me, and what I was to my father.
I am sharing some of the special moments in my 57 years with him.
When I was a boy of four or five, my father would come home in the evening with a set of prints and spread them on the table. There would be discussions with artists and photographer friends on what images worked creatively and what did not. Some of these friends were Jatin Das, Himmat Shah, S. Paul (my father’s elder brother and guru), and Kishore Parekh, another famous photographer. Kishore uncle was also the photo editor of Hindustan Times when my father joined the newspaper in Delhi in the late 1960s. He played an important role in honing my father’s skill and vision as a photographer.
Before I realised it, my interest in photography and art started developing, and my home became a great place of learning. When I was about seven years old, I asked my father for a camera, and so began my journey as a creative photographer; my home became my centre of learning. It was a place where there was always classical music playing and where artists, photographers, writers and friends of my parents congregated often.
With son Nitin
My father was extremely fond of Hindustani classical music. There was a point when he wanted to become a musician. His love for Hindustani classical was so strong that when he did not become a musician, he did a coffee table book on its maestros. He was particularly fond of Kumar Gandharva, Bhimsen Joshi, Ali Akbar Khan, Bismillah Khan and Kishori Amonkar.
When I got my first camera, I set up a dark room at home with my father’s help. At a very young age, I learnt the importance of quality prints by assisting my father. Soon, I also started assisting him on his assignments and book projects like the one on Taj Mahal.
At this point, a few of my friends, too, were learning photography, like Arko Dutta, who shared a dark room with me: my converted bathroom. There was also Swapan Parekh, Kishore uncle’s son, and my cousin Neeraj Paul. My father influenced all their forays into photography.
In 1987, when I was 18, I started working for Sunday magazine, India’s second largest magazine then. On December 6, 1992, my father and I were both at Ayodhya—he was then the photo editor of India Today. When the demolition of Babri Masjid began, the kar sevaks started breaking the photographers’ cameras. I, along with the well-known photojournalists Pablo Bartholomew and Praveen Jain, were attacked. Pablo’s head was hit with a brick. I ran to a woman IPS officer, Anju Gupta, for help. She hid us in a hut. There were rumours that I had been stabbed and my worried father searched for me among the injured and the dead in hospitals. Late at night, Anju came and escorted us out. My father hugged me, and when my image of the Masjid’s demolition was used on the cover of TIME, his eyes glowed with pride.
Later that year, I won the Nikon International award. When I won awards or did a photo story for Sunday that he liked, he would gift me a camera. His appreciation meant the world to me. By 1993, I had become the photo editor of Sunday and was shooting most of their covers.
My father was famous for the photo stories he did for India Today. So, when I started doing photo stories for Sunday, he taught me how to work on layout, design and selection of images to create a powerful story. By this time, I had also started doing commercial assignments for advertising agencies and corporate clients. There were two reasons for this: I loved doing multi-genre photography and commercial assignments paid much more than photo-journalistic work. My father was unhappy as he wanted me to stick to photo-journalism and documentary photography. But when I did my coffee table book Through My Eyes, and asked my father which part of the book he liked best, he said the section on fashion. I heaved a sigh of relief.
Over the next couple of decades, papa and I collaborated on various projects and books. He not only documented life in India, but also raised photography to the level of art. Raghu Rai was to photography what M. F. Husain was to painting and Lata Mangeshkar to popular music.
My father was also a very generous person. One day in 2004 I got a call from him saying he wanted to discuss something important. When I reached, he took me outside and handed me the keys to a shining, brand new black Scorpio SUV. I could not believe it.
My papa was a very spiritual person. When I was a little boy, Mother Teresa came home and blessed me. A few years later, when I was assigned to photograph the Dalai Lama for Sunday, my request for a shoot was turned down by his office. I went anyway and met him with my correspondent. I was introduced as Nitin Rai, photo editor of Sunday and Raghu Rai’s son. The Dalai Lama grinned widely, pulled my ears, looked straight into my eyes and said, “So you are Raghu’s son”. He was very fond of my father and asked what I would like him to do. I asked if I could spend five minutes photographing him during the day. He said, “Absolutely.” The shoot happened because of his affection for my father. Through papa I was also introduced to Pramukh Swami Maharaj, who was the Guru for the Swaminarain sect; he, too, had great affection for my father.
Papa always preferred being in nature, rather than at fancy parties. He preferred sleeping on the grass at our farm, rather than in a fancy hotel bed. His images told a story that immediately connected with viewers. His greatest contribution to photography was the connect with imagery he made possible for the masses. Despite all the plaudits, papa was extremely humble. It seems only right to conclude with a line from ‘Ud Jayega Hans Akela’, my father’s favourite nirgun bhajan of Kumar Gandharva: Udja ja hans akela, chod ke is jag darshan ka mela (Fly away, fly away alone you swan, leaving behind this worldly panorama).