Edge Of Innocence

It is a place seemingly frozen in a more innocent time; empty roads and hardly any cars, lifted straight out of a children book about a summer adventure in a world without care. It celebrates innocence and childhood. But this is also the most inappropriate time to look at childhood through tinted spectacles. Something has changed in the general timetable of childhood, and the anxiety is palpable. Innocence is under constant revision: A mix of the realistic and the absurd, seen through the eyes of a child . Like an ounce of khichdi-the first meal in two days for a homeless girl. "I feel like a princess right now," she says, cradling the plastic totem of oour impotency.

Photographs by Jitender Gupta, Sandipan Chatterjee, Apoorva Salkade, Tribhuvan Tiwari , Suresh K. Pandey