A portrait of Bipin Kumar Sinha at the Birsa Munda Central Jail in Ranchi (moments after Koda left the room), 2010

As part of the Art Karavan International - a two month kind of nomadic travelling-art-residency-project-and-experiment - I was taken to the Birsa Munda Central Jail in Ranchi to meet and work with some of the female inmates. After our arrival we were taken into Mr Bipin Kumar Sinha's office where upon we came across none other than Madhu Koda, the ex-chief minister of Jharkhand currently in prison on charges of money laundering, enjoying a cup of chai. After Koda awkwardly and rather quietly left the room Mr Sinha was not in the least bit shy of informing us who his esteemed and notorious guest was.

Moments after Madu Koda left the room I asked Mr Sinha if he would mind posing while I captured a brief video portrait of him on my camera, to which he willingly obliged. What I found interesting about this video portrait - beyond the charged context in which it was made, is the proud, gentle and increasingly uncomfortable movement of Mr Sinha's facial expressions, as he himself, for a couple of minutes, was put under the examining gaze of a moving camera.

I can't leave this little story without mentioning the fact that all the women in the prison we later met were from very poor socio-economic backgrounds. But as the expample of Madhu Koda goes to show, it is not only poor people who break the rules, it is just the nature of their conviction and punishment differs greatly.