Harish Gilai

1 month ago | thehindu.com | T. Appala Naidu |Harish Gilai |B. Madhu Gopal |Sumit Bhattacharjee

As dawn breaks over Addangi, a hamlet nestled in the folds of the Eastern Ghats in Srikakulam district, 23-year-old Savara Kalavathi steps barefoot into a modest building with an asbestos roof. She cleans the floor and sprinkles cow dung water on the front yard before lighting a small brass lamp in a wall niche. She folds her hands and closes her eyes in reverence as the slender flame flickers to life.

1 month ago | thehindu.com | Harish Gilai |B. Madhu Gopal |Sumit Bhattacharjee |T. Appala Naidu

In Byluppala village of Kurnool district, four-year-old Nandini and five-year-old Harshavardhan scampered around their house, their excited shrieks drowning out their grandmother Malakka Hanumanthamma’s gentle reprimand for playing under the blistering summer sun. At 80, Hanumanthamma struggles to care for the two children as well as her ailing husband, Timmaiah, alone, but it can’t be helped.

1 month ago | thehindu.com | Harish Gilai |B. Madhu Gopal

When Umamaheswara Rao and wife Sailaja set out to the Simhachalam hills in Visakhapatnam from their home at Chandrampalem at 2.30 a.m. on April 30, they were probably thinking of the moment they would finally fulfil a long-cherished dream: to witness the ‘nijaroopa darshan’ of Sri Varaha Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy, a rare sight available only once a year during the temple’s ‘Chandanotsavam’. The couple were just three years into their marriage, and life seemed good.

2 months ago | thehindu.com | Sumit Bhattacharjee |Harish Gilai

Like every other day, Sangarthi Jayalakshmi, in her mid-30s, prepared a lunchbox for her husband, Sangarthi Govindu, 41, on April 13. She saw him off to work from the doorstep of their modest house in Kailasapatnam village, Kotavuratla mandal, Anakapalli district, Andhra Pradesh. Around 1 p.m. that day, Jayalakshmi received a phone call asking her to rush to the firecracker unit where Govindu had been working for 12 years.