Sometime last year there was a guest entry in our Guestbook by V.K. Deshpande that referred my father as "KL". I'd never heard that before, and obviously it conveyed a close friendship. So I contacted him.
This week, in he what he calls History, mystery, and diversity of Kamat he remembers Bappa and provides some insights into how the massive Kamat Archive was formed.
Just to give you an idea of the depth and span of Kamat archives:
- Estimated 200,000 photographs of India -- that is more than ten photographs taken everyday of the year, for fifty years !
- Twenty-two published books in Kannada covering different regions of India and discussing contemporary social life
- Estimated two hundred articles published in popular, and scholarly periodicals
- Over a thousand hand-drawn illustrations of hard-to-photograph topics, notes spread in twenty diaries
All this was done by one poor man without a job (Dr. Deshpande's assertion that Kamat did not find employment in India is true. It is perhaps also true that Kamat lived poor by choice), or any institutional help.
