Photography and text by Will Durbin

This past summer I spent working on microfinance in Mancherial, Andhra Pradesh, India. Mancherial is a “small” town of about 60,000, yet little about Mancherial felt like a small town to me. It is basically a mini-Hyderabad (the major regional capital about five hours away): like every Indian city that I visited, Mancherial has the pervading aura of chai tea and jasmine flowers, of curry powder and roasting chillies, of human urine and burning plastic and prayer incense; the cacophony of honking auto-rickshaws and bellowing trucks and yelling hawkers – in short, the wonders and chaos of urban India. Mancherial has all this (and much more) – just on a smaller scale than Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai.

Everywhere I went in Mancherial, I was warmly received. As basically the only white-skinned person in town, I became a bit of a celebrity. (It's way over-rated.) I had my photo taken a hundred times with Indians with whom I could barely communicate. Many simply wanted to meet someone new and different; others wanted me to help them get to the U.S. It was not easy to tell whether people liked me because I was different or because I might offer them something; the truth was probably – and understandably – both.

In my photos, I attempt to highlight some of India's growing pains. Here in the West, we hear quite a bit about how India and China are poised to wrest the mantle of economic superpower from the U.S. Indeed, India has developed rapidly over the past two decades, and Indian businesses are among the most technologically advanced in the world. Yet 300 million people in India remain in severe poverty. For them, the call-centers and consulting firms we in the West read so much about and experience first-hand are not even a distant dream. At the same time, India obviously has so much to celebrate. India is an impossibly complex and rich place; these photos are just a tiny (and woefully insufficient) peek into an ancient an ever-changing society.