So it's not surprising that John McConnico, Delhi-based photo editor (South Asia) of the Associated Press and winner of this year's Pulitzer prize for spot photography, is feeling a wee bit uncomfortable about all the attention.

``I feel as if I have got it for free right now, as if I haven't paid my dues. I think I would have felt better about getting it at 40,'' says the man who has picked up the Pulitzer along with a group of five other AP photographers. Khalil Senosi, Sayyid Azim, Jean-Marc Bouju, Dave Caulkin and Brennan Linsley and McConnico won the prized award for their coverage of the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

McConnico was in fact in Delhi when the first pictures and stories about the near-simultaneous bomb explosions in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam were flashed. Within hours he was on a flight to Nairobi, where his firststop was the explosion site.

``It was chaotic and shocking. We were there for three weeks, sleeping on couches in the office. But we worked very well as a team, each one knew just what he had to do. So there was a feeling of satisfaction when we flew out of the country,'' he recalls.

Satisfaction after recording death and destruction for three weeks? ``As a photographer my job is to document, not interpret. I am not supposed to get too emotional about the pictures I click. And it's not that gory or bloody photographs always make the best images. It's the ability to capture the moments within the moments, the reflection of the moment,'' he says.

But it's not that McConnico was born with a passion for photography; he picked up a camera for the first time only when he was 20 and went through a photography course in college only because it was ``the easy way out''.

But once he picked up the camera, he never let go not only because he loved photography but also because it helped him overcome a weakness.``I was terrified of people. I had great difficulty in relating to them. The camera became my shield,'' he says.

Delhi, therefore, came as quite a shock when McConnico first came here a year ago from Puerto Rico. ``But India is such a vibrant place. Each day is so different from the other. Each place is so different from the other,'' he says, rating Dharamshala and Chennai as his favourites.

And not one film star makes it to his list of Indians whom he would like to capture with his $10,000 equipment.

``I admire Pandit Ravi Shankar, the Dalai Lama, M F Husain. I met Sachin Tendulkar when he came for a match to the Caribbean. At that time I didn't even know how big a name he was, I just went and shook hands with him. But at that moment I felt greatness. So, in a way I knew India even before coming here.''

As for his Master's degree in journalism, McConnico makes use of it to write a few odd lines now and then. Otherwise, it is just ``too painful'' for him to indulge in. And anything more painful thanwriting? ``Someone clicking my photographs,'' he shrieks.