Wow. You're still reading our blog! Thanks for checking in, and sorry it's been so long since we posted. I'm going to put up a few more photos then sign off.
It's been a whirlwind couple of weeks since we returned from our own version of "Around the World in Eighty Days." I've been sorting and playing with all our photos and putting together a slide show version of our adventure which I'll gleefully use to torture friends and relatives for many years to come.
It's spring, at least for a week, in Minnesota, and Donna and I are in the garden doing premature digging and bed-building. It's too early to do much gardening here on the Minnetundra, but both of us are experiencing a strange sort of seasonal confusion where we think Spring should be further along than it is, in spite of what the calendar and thermometer tell us. We visited so many really hot and sultry places, then went from Winter to Spring and back again over and over in Europe. As a result, our seasonal synapses aren't firing properly.
While sorting and tossing, a handful of pictures just seemed to be particularly evocative and to capture the feeling of a place or a people. This is one of them, and I'm putting it up today because it's got a Spring connection.
This photo was taken in the Pali District of Rajasthan in India, near the Jain Temple of Ranakpur. This Rajasthani shepherd man is wearing traditional turban and wrap pants. It's a style that's still very common in the villages and smaller towns but appears headed for obsolescence as virtually all the young people wear western-style clothing.
This fellow is also wearing some leftover color from Holi, the Hindu color festival and raucous celebration of Spring. It's quite literally a "spring fling." All over India, people throw off the gloom of Winter (or in Rajasthan's case the DRY of winter) by throwing colored powder or dyed water at each other. Poof. Yellow. Splat. Orange. Kerplunk. Blue. It's India's rowdiest day. While Holi had been about a week before we arrived, we saw many people -- and some camels, cows and elephants -- who still wore their bright spring Holi colors.
For blog devotees, you'll remember that Holi also played a role in our epic traffic jam.
Yes, you clever photo detectives. I DID do some Photoshop retouching and creative motion blurring on this shot. I even removed a bus and a hotel direction sign.
In spite of buses that get in the way of his sheep and the occasional tourist with camera (er, like me) there's much about this man's life that's the same as it would have been many hundreds of years ago. In the villages, ancient social norms and traditions endure, particularly for women. Marriages are inevitably arranged. "Love marriages" which run counter to the arrangements of the parents, or premarital pregnancy can still result in an unofficial and unprosecuted but very real death sentence. There's still a feeling of normalcy and even pride in some aspects of the caste system and one's place in it...at least according to the few people I spoke to about it. Within a caste, there can be many levels and one's position in a caste is important and sometimes a matter of great pride.
A few more photos to come.
Paul
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