Wetlook World ForumCurrent time: Fri 29/03/24 08:16:53 GMT |
Message # 41163 Subject: Indian wetlook search terms Date: Mon 07/09/09 14:17:18 GMT Name: watershed |
Report Abuse or Problem to Nigel at Minxmovies
|
A Google image search for ("holy bath" OR "holy bathing") will retrieve a lot
of wet sarees. The examples are too many for me to take the time to list here, but here are a couple of particularly good ones (IMO) from the first few pages of results:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13626255@N08/2354694913/sizes/o/ http://img3.photographersdirect.com/img/26650/wm/pd2288022.jpg
I like these much better than the American baptism photographs that we often see in this forum. It isn't that I don't enjoy the baptism photographs -- both are the same genre of cleansing, devotional ritual, a loosing hold of boundaries and allowing the water to flow around and, metaphorically, through the person -- but it seems to me that the average Hindu believer holds a much deeper, more organic sense of the power of water as a symbol of life, rebirth, and fertility than the average American Christian has. Perhaps as a consequence, or perhaps also as a cause of this deep belief, Indians seem much more at ease with water and wet clothes than Westerners do: in a Western baptism, it seems to me, the willingness to wet ones clothes signals a special occasion, whereas in an Indian holy bath, the nonchalance with which clothes are worn into the water is a mark of the very ordinariness and ubiquity of water. (I guess it helps to live in a part of the world that has monsoon rains.) One can see this difference in the faces: the American baptised are *ecstatic* and peaceful, the Indian bathers *calm* and peaceful.
|
Report Abuse or Problem to Nigel at Minxmovies
If you enjoy this forum, then please make a small donation to help with running costs:
(you can change amount)
|
[ This page took 0.016 seconds to generate ]