India is not a country that eases you in gently. It doesn't really do gentle. It's a place of somewhere between 1.4 and 1.5 billion people, the most populous nation on earth, having overtaken China in 2023, and it carries that scale in everything: the noise, the colour, the traffic, the sheer press of human life happening all around you at once.

It is the world's largest democracy, has a space programme, a film industry that dwarfs Hollywood, and somewhere in excess of twenty official languages. It's not a country so much as a civilisation that happens to have borders around it.

In this special, we go to two cities. Kolkata, in the east, formerly Calcutta, and Varanasi, on the Ganges, which may well be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world and which confronts you, very directly, with questions about life and death that most of us spend considerable energy avoiding.

Into all of this walked eight photographers, Anne, Bill, Fraser, Lloyd, Mercedes, Nicola, Owen and Peter, along with my travelling partner, in The Journey Beyond Lynn Fraser, and our Indian mentors and guides: Shivam, Shubh, Mohit and Arvind.

What you're about to hear is an India special edition of the Photowalk Podcast, and honestly, as you'll hear, it affected us in ways we weren't expecting. It's a long episode, and for that I make no apology… but I hope that, with the music, the characters, the surprises, and the scenes described, you will feel you have photowalked there with us.

Read more about our photographic adventures on our photography travel website, The Journey Beyond.

Links to all guests and features will be on the show page, my sincere thanks to our Extra Milers, without whom we wouldn't be walking each week and Arthelper.ai, giving photographers smart tools to plan, promote, and manage your creative projects more easily.

WHY: A Sketchbook of Life is available here.

After a handful of specials, four weeks away from the studio, and a journey that took me from Austria to Bangladesh and on into India, it feels a little overdue, and very welcome, to make this a mailbag week, walking one of my favourite photowalk paths with camera and Sir Barkalot, spending a good hour and a bit with the letters you've been sending in, some contemplative music, the wind doing its thing along the path, and the welcome return of Valerie Jardin, our street photography mentor, fresh from her own travels in Mexico, for TEACH ME STREET.

Letters and stories today from Martyn Cox, who wonders if exotic places and travel lead to making better photographs, Paul Morgan has some thoughts on Bangladesh and her workforce, Andreas Noeh shares a super project from New York where loft life rules for artists, Jon Otis has me diving for cover behind the sofa of flattery, Dennis Linden is researching family history and creating his own, Tom Cavness practices Haiku, and Monika Adler finds profound beauty and peace with her photography and a famous English backdrop.

Read more about our photographic adventures on our photography travel website, The Journey Beyond.

Links to all guests and features will be on the show page, my sincere thanks to our Extra Milers, without whom we wouldn't be walking each week and Arthelper.ai, giving photographers smart tools to plan, promote, and manage your creative projects more easily.

WHY: A Sketchbook of Life is available here.

Today, the show travels to Bangladesh. It's the first of two specials, as we visit India too in the coming weeks.

Bangladesh is roughly the size of England, with a population of between 170 and 200 million people. Dhaka is one of the busiest, loudest, most relentlessly alive cities you are ever likely to walk through. The city runs on noise, an orchestra of car, bus, rickshaw and tuk-tuk horns and beeps that never quite stops, layers of sound that, after a while, start to feel almost normal.

We walk the riverbanks of the Buriganga, explore the shipyards of Keraniganj, lose ourselves in the markets of Old Dhaka, and find ourselves unexpectedly invited through a wall into a Krishna festival in full swing. Along the way, we photograph the sand carriers of the river and spend time in a city that rewards anyone willing to look past the surface.

Into all of this walked my travel partner, Lynn Fraser, and I, with cameras and the great fortune of having GMB Akash as our guide, a World Press Photo winner who has spent his career photographing lives on the margins in a way that gives people back their dignity rather than reducing them to their hardships. This isn't a formal interview with him, more time spent together in his city, with his people. You'll get a very clear sense of who he is. We certainly did.

Read more about our photographic adventures on our photography travel website, The Journey Beyond.

Links to all guests and features will be on the show page, my sincere thanks to our Extra Milers, without whom we wouldn't be walking each week and Arthelper.ai, giving photographers smart tools to plan, promote, and manage your creative projects more easily.

WHY: A Sketchbook of Life is available here.