Ashok Ginde knows that every person has a story.

In fact, “every person has a story” is the motto of his Instagram account, This is Hillsdale. The account highlights different events and people around Hillsdale, including many current and former Pascack Valley students.

“I just really wanted to tell the stories of the people within Hillsdale and create some community pride,” Ginde said. “[It] doesn’t matter where you live or where you come from, or even if you come from a small town like Hillsdale—we all have an individual story that everyone can relate to, [a story] that everyone can connect with or root for.”

Ginde is a Hillsdale resident and a dad of three: a third-grader, a fifth-grader, and a seventh-grader, all in the Hillsdale Public Schools district. He grew up in Maryland and went to Duke University for his undergraduate degree and went to Boston University for law school. 

“I [later] moved out to DC, and that’s where I met my wife,” Ginde said. “Her family’s from New Jersey. We got married in 2006, and then we moved up to New Jersey around the same time.”

Ginde originally created the This is Hillsdale account in the middle of the pandemic to practice his photography. 

“I wanted to find a hobby that I could work on, and I thought I could just [explore] my town and take some pictures,” Ginde said. “So I went to landmark sites in Hillsdale, like the train station, Veterans’ Park, and Sapienza Gardens, and I started taking pictures and [kept working] on my skills and technique.”

The first person he profiled on his account was 2021 PV alum Jake Wolf, who played for the PV boys’ basketball team. Ginde has always been interested in basketball—he grew up playing it, his kids play it, and he now coaches the Hillsdale Hoops team, a travel basketball program for Hillsdale girls and boys in 2nd to 8th grade.

“[Wolf] was one of the star players on the team,” Ginde said. “I reached out [and asked if I could profile him] and immediately he just said yes. He had no idea who I even was. The ball just kind of went rolling from there.”

Since then, Ginde has profiled numerous other PV students and alumni, including 2021 alum Kyle Towey, junior Evie Higgins, senior Steven Demboski and 2018 alum Andre Dabaghian.

“[Ginde] has a really great work ethic—he’s a great guy and a great person,” Dabaghian said. “He [works really hard] both behind the camera and with his actual job. The amount of hours that he puts into This is Hillsdale or his sports account [gets] kind of overlooked, but he’s a hardworking guy.”

Dabaghian and Ginde have also recently started a series on Instagram titled For the Love of the Game, where they highlight different athletes and talk about the player’s relationship with their sport. They recently made their first post in the series about 5-year-old basketball player Aspen Coleman.

Ginde finds people to profile for This is Hillsdale in all different ways. Sometimes he reads about them or sees them on social media. Sometimes, his friends or other people give him ideas. Sometimes, he meets them in unexpected ways, like when he profiled Adam Stamatiadis, a waiter at The Cornerstone Restaurant in Hillsdale.

It was a slow night at The Cornerstone, and Stamatiadis was Ginde and his wife’s server. They found out that although Stamatiadis grew up in Delaware, he spent four months in Greece every summer. When he visited Greece, there was only one water source, and when it dried up, the village was left with no water. This sparked Stamatiadis’s interest in sustainability.

“I never would have met [Stamatiadis] or thought about [his story],” Ginde said. “We make assumptions about people, and then the more you peel back the layers, you realize there’s more to the story, and there’s a lot of interesting facets to people that we may not know [about just by] looking at them.”

Ginde said that when profiling, it is a challenge to condense an entire interview into a 2200 character Instagram caption, especially with longer interviews like Stamatiadis’s, which lasted over 45 minutes. However, Ginde said that it’s “gratifying” to take on the challenge.

“I’ll take some pictures of them [first],” Ginde said. “Then I’ll take my iPhone [and start recording] and I’ll just have an open-ended conversation and try and find out what they’re about.”

Right now, Ginde has been focusing more on his personal Instagram account, @agphoto201. He has taken pictures at numerous sporting events at Bergen County high schools. He said that he “considers PV [his] second home” since he spends so much time at the school between taking photos of sporting events and profiling PV students.

In the future, Ginde hopes to collaborate more with others on This is Hillsdale. He featured his first guest post in January, written by one of his friends, Dan Fridliand, about Jaleel Felton, a PV alum who was involved in track and football in high school. After graduating, Felton started getting interested in music production, and now “he’s trying to really turn [music] into a career.”

As of now, Ginde just wants to keep telling people’s stories. He said that he would love to profile Hillsdale teachers, who “contribute so much to [the town].” He would also like to help organize events in the community, such as a concert featuring Felton and other Hillsdale talent.

“I love Hillsdale. I think everyone here is so down to earth,” Ginde said. “I love the small-town feel—it’s just a good community.”