Bandh-hit Kolkata a bonus for visiting foreign scribes

As a vacant Esplanade looking broader than ever before waited patiently for traffic on Friday morning, three South Korean gentlemen busily strutted up and down the thoroughfare. While one had a camera in hand and the second one held on to a tripod, the third sat on the road divider, intently observing a city brought to a standstill by the bandh. "There, watch that car," shouted one of them, triggering a flurry of activity.Photographs were taken and notes scribbled on a writing pad.
James Lee, Daniel Sago and Chin Khim freelance journalists from Seoul are fascinated by bandhs. The trio has been clicking photos and writing about bandh-struck Kolkata for the last six years. While Lee files his stories for a weekly magazine, Sago and Khim are photographers who have been merrily selling bandh pictures to various South Korean publications who are taken by it as well. All three have picked up Hindi.
"Bandhs are a wonderful photo opportunity, which is peculiar only to India, particularly Kolkata. The way everything shuts down, political parties go on the rampage, traffic disappears and shops down shutters is incredible. It doesn't happen anywhere else in the world and certainly reflects upon the psyche of a nation. You might feel tempted to criticize it from a distance, but you must accept that this has been a very effective medium of protest for a very long time," observed Lee. He claims to have written numerous stories on Kolkata bandhs for Sisa In, a South Korean news magazine, but plans to write more. "People back home are curious. Protests and strikes in Korea are very different. They are never organized by parties, but by trade unions. It is more in the form of a protest than a complete shutdown, which won't be allowed in Korea," explained Lee.
Bandh veterans they may be, but the deserted roads, empty stations and vacant hospitals don't cease to surprise the trio. They have been camping in Kolkata for the last three months researching on hand-pulled rickshaws, that are set to be withdrawn from the city. "We are doing a photo-feature and a series of stories on rickshaws that now exist in only a few cities in South-East Asia. Fortunately for us, this bandh was a bonus," said a beaming Sago, looking through his camera.
Now on their sixth visit to India, the team says they have never had any unpleasant experience in the city. "Kolkata is very warm, though the people are a bit temperamental. It is easy to strike a chord with the locals, especially for us, since we know Hindi. We still haven't picked up Bengali, but if we continue to visit the city at this rate, we might just start learning the language," said Khim.