I thought of writing a post about why India is hard when you stay long there but then I realized it's better to stop - too easy to slip into a dark cloud after an overdose I got. Especially because I am having rest from India - arrived in Pokhara, Nepal, staying in a rural-ish part of it. A really shanti place, no Royal Enfields are trying to kill me 20 times a day here, feel safe here, feel at home here. Eat much, sleep much, photograph not much, so let me share a bunch of unpublished pictures from Bikaner - from the very beginning of my Indian adventure 2025-2026, which was in October.
Roofs of Bikaner, 100 km from the border with Pakistan, the Middle East flavor in the skyline, coincidentally or not.
There is a significant number of Muslims in the city, although Bikaner is mostly populated by Hindus.
Religion is important here, I'd say more important than in many other regions of India.
Let's go down to the streets.
Clothes signal about religion too - Hindu women wear colorful saris; they often cover their faces to protect them from the sunlight and dust - some men cover their faces with scarves too.
But none of them have to hide their face.
Yeah, red and rose saris are about Rajasthan, and it seems this feast of colors reaches its peak in the desert city of Bikaner.
Traffic is awful, overcrowding is awful, you have no place to stand and breathe out.
The old city isn't large, but curious. Old houses decorated with carvings, narrow streets.
Cows are roaming. This building is the very heart of old Bikaner, this corner is regularly cleaned and more peaceful than any other part of the city.
But alas heritage buildings don't form a vast area, but rather scattered here and there in the older part of the city (look at these cool balconies with carvings).
And that's another attraction - a Jain temple:
Namely Seth Bhandashah Jain Temple, these are its murals.
A beautiful place, with much golden decorations inside:
Let's return to the streets:
It's full of colorful characters but I can hardly call Bikaner a great place for street photography for foreigners - locals can leave you alone especially when you are with a big camera - shaking hands constantly, posing for the camera, taking selfies together, the same dialogues "where are you from", etc. I don't blame people but I got exhausted soon.
By the way, more visited places like Jodhpur, Pushkar, Varanasi, etc, don't have this issue - normally nobody disturbs you, and those 2-3 small talks with strangers a day only make your walk lovelier.
Looking through folders on my disks, I even got inspired by these portraits, many of which taken with open aperture between f/1.8 and f/2.5.
These portraits look quite static and calm - people posing with smiles but actually it was quite chaotic - with motorbikes and rickshaws trying to kill me from left and right, people pushing me from left and right, lol, with random objects entering the frame's background...
These guys were just passing on a motorbike, and asked me to photograph them.
And this one is my favorite - so diverse appearance, so funny, so young and positive - strangers on a motorbike who came from the dark of the Rajasthani night and soon disappeared into it.
More portraits from Bikaner you can see here: "Night Portraits on Diwali in Bikaner" .
The photos were taken with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G and Nikkor 24mm f/2.8D on a full-frame DSLR Nikon D750 in October 2025 in Bikaner, Rajasthan, India.