The best Ad against sex determination

New Delhi, Feb 24 (UNI) This image is more powerful than any government advertisement for a ban on sex determination test.

A pregnant woman sitting inside an ultrasound lab in South Delhi, looking intensely into the camera and waiting for her turn, with an advertisement on the wall behind proclaiming: 'Here Pre-Natal Sex Determination (Boy or Girl) Before Birth Is Not Done. It Is A Punishable Act.' The woman, Neetika, is the wife of the very photographer who has taken the snap and used it as part of his exhibition in the capital.

They have a son who also appears in the family photo album put up at 'Photoink' studio of Devika Daulatsinh.

Though other snapshots also have the three in different settings and stages of life, Anay Mann's photographs are basically about Neetika.

Neetika-- a stylist who had worked with other photographers, including Anay, was at first reluctant to be photographed. But she was his muse. And when he said he wanted to record his love story, their shared history, just for themselves, she hesitantly agreed.

So we have other photographs where we see Neetika trimmings his goatee; he sitting on the steps of his house with his son and she putting on a sari on the other side of the partition; and he looking into the bathroom mirror stark naked and she sitting in a pot next to him, emptying her bladder.

''But if my photos remain very much Neetika, they also are about our 'not perfect' yet warm and close relationship,'' he says.

Perhaps more importantly, however, they are also the mirror of a post baby-boomer-style of the middle class single child urban family in India today.

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