Rock-a-bye-Baby
Traditional houses in western India, Gujarat and Rajasthan, are small and round with conical straw roofs. The women love color and decoration and have become experts at painting, embroidering, and sewing. They make the beautiful hand embroidered clothing that the men wear, they decorate the fronts of their homes with stylized drawings of animals or geometric designs. They inset tiny mirrors into raised plasterwork on interior walls. You can see here that the metal suitcases that hold the families goods are also painted in lovely floral designs. Do they remind you of Hungarian folk painting? They do remind me. The red carved ‘posts’ are the legs of the family’s charpoy, a bed with a string mattress used as a place to sit during the day.
Here’s a question: do you think an older woman will have better photo opportunities when visiting homes and tribes such as from this photo? I say, “Yes.” Here is why: I think that older women are not threatening to anyone. In most societies she will be treated with respect. If she enters a house with women only, she will be welcomed almost as if she is family. Once when I walked into a bunga like this one, a young woman sat at my feet and took down her long, beautiful hair and started combing it. This would never happen if I were a man, old or young. I doubt if a man could even enter the hut.
Young men are not interested in old women as they might be with a younger and more attractive woman. I think the same applies to old men. This allows the older woman to photograph them without ‘connecting’ if you get my drift!
My conclusion is that older women have more opportunities than men do to photograph the more intimate side of life. I think that many men would be embarrassed to enter the hut even if invited to do so.
Still, I think men may have the ultimate advantage in that they can go about publicly with less chance of being harassed. A lone man trudging down the road will not be the ‘target’ that a woman might be. I’m reading Paul Theroux’s book, “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” and oh, I envy him riding the train from London to Istanbul. Paul gets cat calls, but nothing serious.
When I was in Syria last October, we came across a German woman, maybe around 50 years old, but still drop-dead gorgeous with her rosy, tanned skin and blond hair and her very fit figure. She had bicycled to Syria from Germany!! She stayed with the headman if she came to a village without a guesthouse, or she waited until dark and sheltered in an abandoned building. Talk about brave! She’d traveled all over world that way and she did it alone riding her mountain bike.
We were all aghast at her audacity and amazed that she had the time to travel like this. We came to the conclusion that she was independently wealthy, but we may have been wrong.