Colour or black and white?

I took this photo of a chicken butcher in his little stall in the huge municipal market in Ooty,Tamil Nadu, India back in 2015.
The photo was taken with my Leica X1 and it was selected by Leica Fotografie International to go into the LFI Gallery as a Leica Mastershot last year. I now have had 8 photos selected as Mastershots and I always feel a little extra satisfaction when a photo taken with the dimunitive X1 is selected as a Mastershot. The photo is from a DNG ( RAW) file processed in Lightroom.

I've taken and processed and printed tens of thousands of black and white-aka monochrome-photos over the years. When I started photography as a hobby black and white was the default option. Colour was very rare and very expensive. So I am not averse to black and white but nowadays much prefer to stay with colour. However friend Wayne just sent me details of a local photo competition for monochrome. I opened my mind when I saw the prizes on offer and quickly sought out a suitable colour photo for conversion into monochrome for entry into the People class.

The chicken butcher was the obvious candidate and I converted the file using Nix Silver Efex Pro2.  I am very happy with the result -below-although I still prefer the colour original. It would be nice to say that I reckon that I am in with a chance in the competition but as I have found out time after time photo competition judging is highly subjective and a photo which wins a major prize in one competition may well not make the cut in the next competition so I am not holding my breath on the result. I know that I have given it my best shot.-literally.