—Categories: myanmar, travel photography

Snap Stories: Photographing Yangon’s Circular Railway

Snap Stories is a monthly column I write for a travel magazine. ‘Photographing Yangon’s Circular Railway’ was published in January 2014.

I boarded Yangon’s circular railway with a lot of ideas and anticipations circling in my head. One of my self-imposed assignment in Myanmar, when I bought a ticket to Yangon was to photograph the everyday Burmese life. From preliminary research, I realized that one of the best places to see it unfold was the suburban train that touched through the markets and villages around Yangon. There is usually a bustling economic activity in a system that connects an urban center with its surroundings, and I expected it to manifest in front of me inside the circular train.

Circular Railway, Yangon, Myanmar

At Yangon’s Central station, where the train start’s its loop, the nearly empty train contained commuters heading to nearby stations and vendors hopping in and out selling savouries, fruits and betel leaves. We chugged through relatively unpopulated sections of Yangon that alternated between greenery, industrial areas and semi-urban populations.

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—Categories: myanmar, photos

Updating from Yangon, Myanmar

I have been seeing the sights of Yangon, Myanmar, and am enjoying my first look at the country. One of the first things that I did after arriving was to take a local train that took me through the rural outskirts of Yangon City. The trains here are much older and much slower than what we see in India. While a local commuter would long for something newer and faster, for a visitor, they are like a living history.

Circular Train, Yangon, Myanmar

The air in the coach is very casual and easygoing. Many traders use the train to ferry their goods into and out of market. Stuff that I saw entering into the train that day included this large load of Bananas, plenty of vegetables, bedding materials and a huge white sack of which I do not know the content. Conversations with strangers was easy to initiate and was much enjoyed despite constraints of language.

Food vendors also keep moving in and out too. On sale were beetle-nut to chew, groundnuts, quail eggs, grapes and fried snacks.