WE ARE INTERRUPTING TODAY'S PROGRAM...........

Of hole digging, wall taping, laundry washing, cat chasing, contractor emailing, reference-seeking, list-making to bring you:



OK these will make my pictures look like doo-doo but I embrace risk for your AND MY (I'm sure ultimate, no-yes I mean IMMEDIATE) edification.  My stomach is churning and my temperature's just gone up about 20 degrees.


I credit Toujours Dimanche (the Canadian one from What Possessed Me's blogroll) for leading me to these images.


http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/recent_hindu_festivals_and_rit.html


I'm showing you a picture that more closely characterizes my current state.  Rather than a picture that I hope will elicit such a state in you.  Those other pictures, they peter out in interest factor (to me) towards the end.  But in all there are 35 of them or so.  With the first 8-10 I gasped out loud as each one came along.


I didn't think an "outsider" could get these first pictures.  OOPS!  I'm wrong.  Apologies to AP's Kevin Frayer, he is the exception (-al photographer), the others are all done by South Asians.  They are so intimate in a way.


I've said it before, I am not a religious person.  But religion sure makes people do amazing things, good and bad.  In fact, I did witness some religious ceremonies in India and being ignorant and disinclined to the tedium of religious ritual I was not so moved.  These do make amazing visuals though.  And I'm not about sharing to shock in a gratuitous way.  It's not about shock.  It's the sensation.  And the transposition and near derailing of almost physical/physiological norms.  Your eyes are so accustomed to sending the usual messages to the same brain places and filing that information off.  India just twists your brain into loops.  The patterns that can be created by so much colorful humanity acting in concert are just very unexpected to us.  As our Western world neutralizes, homogenizes, degrades and denudes its public face of color and variety - India's particularity persists.  I hope it can be impressed upon them before it is too late that what they have is of tremendous value.  Probably I will be disappointed.  


Now if someone knows if this has been made into a book, let me know.  Because I need to have that book.  But I would only look into it about once every five-ten years because I would not want the images to become banal and routine to me.  I want to have that WHOOSH of sensation and jumping out of my skin everytime I saw them.