The interview took place in Delhi, in an office that hummed with the particular self-importance of a publication that had decided it was the country’s most important. I had travelled from Madras with a portfolio in three parts: photographs from the frontlines of the Sri Lanka conflict: refugees crossing the Palk Strait in open boats, LTTE cadres and leaders, the dead; pictures of life in rural Tamil Nadu; and a published photo essay on Kalakshetra, the great dance school in Madras, shot for a travel magazine.Raghu Rai, the picture editor, moved through the first two groups the way a customs official moves through luggage in which he expects to find nothing. He asked a question here and there, and said nothing about the photographs themselves. Then he opened the travel magazine. He stopped. The briskness left him. He looked up – looked at me as though for the first time, which in some essential way he was – and asked about the experience of making those photographs. He used the word ‘sensitivity’. He wanted to know what it had felt like to be inside that world, among those dancers, in the particular quality of light and devotion that filled that place, making those images. We talked, without hurry, about this and that. I got the job.I did not understand, then, what he had done in that room. He had looked past the conflict photographs – past what I thought I was, and past what the magazine believed it wanted – and found what I actually had to offer. That was Raghu’s gift: he did not read the photograph, he read the person who had made it.I was posted in Madras, and the magazine – based in Delhi, staffed largely by editors who spoke of anyone from the south as Madrasi with the casual cruelty of people who have never examined their own geography – had little use for the south unless a story was deemed large enough to justify an excursion. It was not called North India Today in the southern states without reason. Sri Lanka was the exception. It offered per diem in foreign currency and proximity to a war – for those who shadowed the military, moving from front lines to diplomatic corridors under escort. Editorials mirrored Delhi’s mood. Editors parachuted in and out. They invariably returned – having, for the most part, been conducted through IPKF (Indian Peace Keeping Force)-controlled areas – with strong opinions and publishable bylines, in that order. I was already there, long enough by then to be trusted on both sides of the water.In November 1987, I returned from Jaffna with photographs of a gunship attack on the Chavakachcheri market that had killed civilians, among them a child and men and women well into old age. The IPKF was 17 days into a war it had not anticipated and was not winning. The LTTE had the upper hand. I had also photographed 18 Indian prisoners of war in Tiger custody. Back in India, the defence ministry denied the attack had taken place; the daily newspaper journalist who had accompanied me had already filed his account and the denial was the ministry’s response to it. The magazine, being a fortnightly, had not yet gone to press. A vehicle from the Ministry arrived at the office to collect me for what was described as a debriefing at their headquarters.The purpose of that session was not difficult to read. A debriefing was the mechanism by which publication might be arranged around: the pictures seen, assessed, and buried before they reached print.Raghu raised hell.He did not do it quietly or through channels. He took a firm stand with the editors and had the decision reversed. Then he told me why: if I walked into that Ministry building, I would never again be trusted by the Tamils or the Tigers. The conflict would be closed to me. Every story I might still tell from inside that world would be foreclosed by one afternoon in a government conference room. He was not speaking only about the story at hand. He was thinking further ahead than I could see or the editors had troubled themselves to look.Once the ministry understood the story was going ahead regardless, the denial was dropped. In its place came a new claim: every person killed in the Chavakachcheri market that day – the child, the elderly, all of them – were LTTE militants. The gunship, they now said, had struck on intelligence that rebels were meeting there. The photographs said otherwise. Raghu made sure of that.The story displaced the cover that had already been prepared for print. Both editions of the magazine that fortnight, English and Hindi, carried the photographs on their covers: fighters moving through the flat Tamil light, Indian soldiers fallen at Kokuvil. The English edition went with A Bloodied Accord: Eyewitness Account — In the Tigers’ Den. A month later, the New York Times Magazine ran the story under the headline Sri Lanka: A Nation Disintegrates, with one of the photographs on its cover. Raghu had placed it there through his connections at Magnum, of which he was a member, and had ensured the credit carried the photographer’s name alongside the agency’s. In the world of photojournalism, a credit line is not a formality; it is a record of who was in the field, who took the risk, who made the image. He could have let the institutional credit stand alone. He did not.That story set me on a path I have walked ever since, in directions neither of us could have foreseen that November. Some among the editors called it notoriety. Raghu called it work.Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated at Sriperumbudur on the night of May 21, 1991. I was the only photographer on the aircraft that carried his remains from Madras to New Delhi. In the forward cabin, behind a thin curtain, his widow and his 19-year-old daughter sat with the coffin. Sonia Gandhi appeared frozen, not with grief but the suspension of everything that precedes it. Priyanka Gandhi was dry-eyed, standing guard over her mother, who was bent across the coffin.I moved through the curtain with my cameras.Priyanka saw me. She did not speak immediately. Her eyes asked first, in a way that needed no translation. Then she raised her hand and said, quietly: Please.I returned to my seat and did not take a single photograph.When the plane landed, Raghu was on the tarmac with a phalanx of photographers and television crews. I walked up to him. His first question was the only one that mattered.“Did you get the pictures?”“Not a single one.”“Why?”I told him. He patted me on the back and walked forward to take pictures. The pat lasted perhaps two seconds. No speech, no ceremony. Then he was gone, into the scrum of lenses, doing his job.I understood the weight of that gesture only later, at the office, when the editorial board – half a dozen editors, none of whom had been on the flight – made clear they considered my restraint a failure. The magazine had needed those photographs. I had been there. I had come back empty-handed by choice. The words initiative and journalistic spirit were used, in that register of institutional disappointment that papers over moral cowardice with the language of professionalism.Raghu came back from the tarmac and took them on. He gave those editors, in terms they understood, a lesson in what the craft was actually for. He did not do it gently. He did not need to.The pat on the back, I came to understand, had already said everything. It was both endorsement and absolution, delivered in two seconds by a man who then went straight back to work. There was no sentiment in it, and no ambiguity. In the years since, I have tried to carry what it contained.Among the editors of India Today – a world furnished with degrees, fellowships, political connectedness, and pedigree – Raghu Rai stood apart in a way none of those credentials could have produced. He was a genuine internationalist who was also, paradoxically, the most deeply-rooted Indian among them. He moved through the country’s cultures not as a tourist of his own nation but as someone for whom those cultures – their music, their devotion, their particular quality of attention – were a living inheritance, not a subject. He carried the music of every corner of the subcontinent within him, and moved through its regions and communities with the curiosity of someone who had never mistaken familiarity for understanding.He believed, and said so without embarrassment, that photography was a spiritual practice. I meet my god through my camera, he said, in the plain way he said things that mattered. It was not a pose. It explained the pause at the Kalakshetra photographs, the fury over the ministry vehicle, the two-second pat on a tarmac in Delhi. Each was the act of someone who understood that the camera, used rightly, was an instrument of conscience – and that the person holding it bore the weight of that.Three words stay with me now: empathy, tolerance, humane. They are ordinary words. But in the world of Indian journalism in those years, in the particular climate of that magazine, in those rooms – they were not ordinary qualities. Raghu carried them without announcement and brought them forward at the precise moments when the institution was most tempted to abandon them.He saw me, in an interview room in Delhi, before I knew what I was. He protected what I was becoming at a moment when the institution would have traded it for an afternoon of access. He stood behind what I had chosen to be, on a tarmac and in a conference room, when the institution called that choice weakness. He was, in a building full of the credentialed and the connected, the real Indian in India Today.That is what a picture editor does, if he is Raghu Rai.Shyam Tekwani is a professor and columnist specialising in security affairs and a former photojournalist, The views expressed are his own.