Mother India is a centre for photography, created and directed by Shobha, a professional photographer who lives between India and Italy. A place of cultural exchange between East and West, a meeting point of various activities among which photography, journalism, arts and voluntary social service.
We are based in Goa, Southern India. Our activities may be itinerant, depending on different projects.
Shobha, 54 years old, a well known international photographer, conducts workshops acting as a teacher, and keeps working in India on social photo reporting and artistic projects.
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| Mother India is based in a Portuguese house on Candolim Beach, Goa, India, an ideal place to find concentration, just a few steps from the ocean’s shore, in a jungle with palm trees in a small village inhabited by Indians of christian religion, who during the tourist season rent rooms in simple and comfortable guest houses.The tropical sandy beach stretches along the coastline of Goa, white and interminable.
Wellness, self care, and meditation are part of the local culture. This area is an oasis of a blissful calm, but at the same time is close to the major centres of Goa, vibrant with life, mirrors of economical, social, and cultural development as well as to traditional villages that seem still untouched by time. |
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NOTE ABOUT GOA:
“Goa is not India, Goa is something else” is the first thing taxi drivers tell you just after landing at the airport, and then one hears it repeated unceasingly, with no further explanation. Goa is a strip of land overlooking the Arabic Sea. Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and a myriad of religious groups live together with people from all states of India and from all over the world, different realities meet and melt. Goa portrays India in a small territory: it perfectly expresses contradictions between wealth and poverty, modernity and tradition living side by side. It comprises all different conditions and social groups of nowadays. This makes Goa, more than a mere postcard beauty, a great experiment of cosmopolitan life, a “masala”, the mixture of countless spices that seasons any food.
“Time flows differently here in Goa. That’s true, they told me, but I didn’t believe it till I came here. It’s not only that days go by slowly. It’s as if time had a peculiar density. As if it would detain you. Who gets here may as well try to divert his mind, to carry along the superficiality that fills eyes and minds in the western world. Nothing doing. Here is like someone or something kept holding your hand and telling “look there”. Goa is sticky. There’s too much here instead of the too little I was expecting. Too many things to carry inside you.”.
Ivan Cotroneo, journalist and author, did a feature on Goa with Shobha for the magazine Max in 2006.