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.