This Was Then... Blast From The Past

From hell-pits of Jharkhand, stark images of a world that now remains frozen in frames

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EARTH’S blazing bowels spill out of luminous cracks. Acrid heat rises from a fissured landscape. It’s fire and brimstone; and a toil-weary miner cycles through this Hell. Showing eerie familiarity with the gaseous pungency and the fiery clefts, he gingerly paddles a load of worries home. For, it’s a beaten track this—the cobbled path through Dhanbad’s ‘Lodna fire-area’, where a greedily, shoddily-disembowelled earth has been spewing displeasure and fire for over four decades now. The miner’s fears, though, are more recent.