Very Many Photos, 2010

I think these are viewable now. If you see a link that looks like a broken photo, it is probably slideshow code left over from photobucket. I'm leaving them, for now, in hopes that I can restore some of the slideshows on blogposts.

To get out of one set of photos and back to this list, click the little white (maybe) "X" that's in the upper right (perhaps).

There's something in each photo that I thought was beautiful, or surprising, or interesting, or exotic. There were many things I wanted to look at again, and ask more about, and remember. India was wonderfully overwhelming and I am grateful to everyone who helped me see and taste and hear and touch more of it.

Brooms
Ganesha figures (I should add those I saw in India; these, I brought home)
Halloween Party (and a blogpost Sunday, October 31, 2010)
General, and first week (some duplicates)
Day 16, Bangalore
Days 17-18, Bangalore
Ganesha Swinging
Taco Bell GRANDE
Week 2 otherwise
Day 18, Tuesday, November 9
Pune, shopping
Week 3 Otherwise Museum, Pune
Chitra
Shakthi's Art
Ram's 6th Birthday Party
Fourth week, various

Slide shows (sharing too many photos)

My India photos have been fragile without a backup, and some of the videos were lost because of photobucket, but in 2020, Vlad Gurdiga moved all my photos from photobucket to my site, and found a software tool to share whole folders.

I'll be working on getting those in here so that others (Hema, my hostess, at least) can see my photos, finally.

Those I had shared in the blog before had been out and about, and some on Just Add Light and Stir, but there were many others I hadn't yet fully examined. My computer died in the Phoenix airport on the way home, and so I never had photos outside of photobucket. I am VERY GRATEFUL that every evening, I uploaded what I had, while I was in India. That trip was wonderful, and I'm glad for the images that were rescued and preserved.

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Shree's Shakthri Art

Attachment Parenting session, at Pushpa's house, with Schuyler and David Waynforth on the wall, from Norfolk UK.

Ganesha Figures photographed after I got home

Photos of brooms, which were unfamiliar in their form, and everywhere

Diwali blessings, from the experienced and from one who was learning:
 

Halloween Party, Hema's terrace.

Processing thoughts and knowledge

I haven't finished all the posts I had intended to write for this, and I might yet.

The photos I took in India, I uploaded every night to Photobucket, which at the time was a good and stable platform. Now it is shaky, and expensive. But I'm glad I put the photos there, because on the way home, in the Phoenix airport, my computer died. All my India photos were safe.

Photobucket has lost some of the videos, but not all. Now that I have a computer with lots of space, I hope to download those from Photobucket and share some that I never had shared yet, but I don't promise when or if that will happen.

I never go a day without thinking of India, because I'm surrounded by things I brought back, and use them regularly. Bedding, bags, books, art, clothes. I bought a bedspread (a sheet, they say) for 100 rupees, and it's hanging in the front window as a curtain. It was already sunfaded, which is why it was sold for so little. A local might have talked him down from 100.

As sunfade was its flaw, I didn't mind letting New Mexico's sun shine on it some more.

I hope I will come and tell more stories that people might find, from time to time, by some accident of google search, or that Raghu might find someday when he's thinking about Plants vs. Zombies and living in Pune, or Zoya if she thinks about playing Barbies with me, if she can even remember those days.

Chaotic? Patterns.

Saved here, from facebook, because I like it and it will be lost in the river there. First, my comments, then the one from Hema from March 2019, and then the video she had found, and which is below.

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Sandra Dodd, June 26, 2019:

Hema tagged me in on this while Keith was in the hospital, but I didn't get back to it until today. :-)

The TED talk is super interesting, and though Hema A Bharadwaj tagged me for rangoli reasons (she knows how to do that, and I'm mesmerized when I get to see her do it), I wanted to use two other examples that I noticed during my visit. One is traffic flow, and the other is patterns on clothing.

When I was in traffic, it was exciting. Hema's driving never made me nervous. I was always with people who had automobiles, but I started to want to ride in one of the auto rickshaws, and a couple of days people indulged me, and we did—one day in Bangalore, and another day (with several pick-ups and drop-offs) in Pune.

Along in there, those days, conversationally, I was learning that people pay full price for autos, trucks, auto rickshaws, rather than financing. And they don't have insurance. Though I saw hundreds of thousands of vehicles in motion, I never saw a fender bender or a scratch. So I started thinking about that. And riding in the auto rickshaw, you are down low, without a door, and it seems that it would be scarier, but it wasn't.

Then an image came to me, of how it was all working. It was a stream. The "traffic flow" was more like a natural river, than like American "traffic flow"—and these rickshaws were like fish in that stream. Fish can swim without running into each other. :-) Those rickshaws had not been anywhere that was NOT those Indian streets. They lived there.

The other thing was patterns on women's clothing—embroidered, printed, woven, sometimes two of those together, matched with another piece of clothing that also had a pattern. In terms of my own culture, "too busy" or "clashing," but those outfits did NOT clash, and in the context of that culture, it's nearly impossible for something to be too busy. :-) I didn't understand how different patterns were matched, but I did trust that there were people who DID understand. It was a different artistic world. It was a different pattern stream, which is what this video is about.

Thank you again, Hema, for making it possible for me to see all of that—and to hear the traffic, and to go to markets from malls to street stalls.

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Hema Bharadwaj, March 27, 2019

Loved this! So many metaphors for life in general, understanding India and even the rest of the world. I have lived only 1/4 of my life in India and yet it’s the place my heart feels most at home in, chaos-patterns and all. But this video can speak to the new conversations here in the US about diversity, in ethnicity, language, political views, everything. Inclusion and acceptance of endless variety.

Water Pots

I didn't take this photo, but I did take some I would like to put here with it, and a story to tell, and so I'll get back to this.

Ears and noses

I've been home a few months, but Holly was just showing someone the nose jewelry I brought her, so I went to look for a couple of photos I took (on the sly) of people's jewelry, in India.

This was at the zoo, during week 3, and I'll look for the other one or two I snagged.

Chikki cannot cross the world

In India, I LOVED Chikki! The first time I had it was from this shop:

I don't know the name of that very dinky village. It was "in Velhe," which (I guess) is a district, and it was past the only real village of any size (which might itself have been named "Velhe" but I don't know). http://maps.thefullwiki.org/Velhe If anyone who was there that day can name me names, I'd appreciate it.

I ate chikki several times in India, and then I brought three kinds home. But... it was hard as a rock. We don't have the low elevation and the humidity it needs to live its long life.

I went to check the elevation of Pune:

560 m (1,840 ft) above sea level ... with its tallest hill, Vetal Hill, rising to 800 m (2,600 ft) above sea level

Albuquerque is

4,900 feet (1,490 m) above sea level near the Rio Grande (in the Valley) to over 6,700 feet (1,950 m) in the foothill areas

I'm in the foothills. Chikki doesn't like that.

Chikki is made of ground nuts and jaggery. We have ground nuts. Peanuts, we call them. We don't have jaggery. I think it's a cousin of molasses but it looks nothing on earth like molasses.

While I was in there, I see the temperatures by season:

Winter begins in November; November in particular is referred to as the Rosy Cold (literal translation) (Marathi: गुलाबी थंडी). The daytime temperature hovers around 28 °C (82 °F) while night temperature is below 10 °C (50 °F) for most of December and January, often dropping to 5 to 6 °C (41 to 43 °F). The lowest temperature ever recorded was 1.7 °C on January 17, 1935.

So it hasn't frozen in the city ever!?

Well.... chikki freezes when it goes from Pune to Albuquerque. I'm just sayin'...
(Haven't attempted microwaving it to see if it will soften it up a little, temporarily.)
Source of stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pune

I own this

Take a careful look at the printed bedspread hanging on this wall in a shop in Bangalore. The matching pillow cases are up to the right.

I own this! It is in a suitcase upstairs, and I am about to sleep in my own bed.

Flying Hanuman

The day after I got here, we were at an intersection where a guy was selling these plastic figures, and nothing but these— he probably had 150 of them or more, all this dark orange. We got one for Hema's car and one for me to take home, and I have spent the rest of the time looking for more of them without luck.

After that day, though, we've seen them in four other vehicles, and I'm glad to have one. They bounce along just as happily as can be, watching the road. It's about (as Raghu explained to me) when Hanuman went to get a certain plant from a mountain that would cure Ram's brother. He wasn't sure which plant, or he didn't have time or something, so he made himself big (which is his super power—to be huge or tiny if he needs to be) and flew back with his mace in one hand and the mountain in the other. Raghu told me that Hanuman's mace doesn't need spikes because he doesn't actually even need the mace. He can beat anyone with his bare hands.



See Hanuman there in the upper right?
The car in front of us had one, too:



Here's Hema's, candidly, out in the country. I was taking a picture of the roller, and the road work.



Here it is posed:

Time for Ganesha

This one isn't a clock, but it reminded me of Ninja Turtles. He has a rat, too.



In a museum, marked just "20th century":

Microwave

Rajanigandha

Chitra gave me these flowers. She wrote the name down as rajneekandh but said it might have a g. I found them as Rajanigandha, and the photo is the same.



Here's a photo of Pradnya, me, Hema and Chitra:



Here's a cool photo showing all five kids, doing various things:



More about the flower: http://www.flowersofindia.net/catalog/slides/Rajanigandha.html

I saw some in Hawaii, too, and I think they might have been what the lei was made of that Jihong brought when she met me at the airport. It feels the same and smells like Hawaii to me. :-)

The Meridien Hotel

Lunch at the The Meridien Hotel in Pune:



The elevators have mirrors in them. This is my flash in a mirror in a fancy elevator I did not go into.



The first two are elevators. The third one is a supply closet. Nice, huh? Really nice camouflage. The elevator that never arrives.



Hema was having a beautiful hair day.



This ice was put into the glass at the table, with tongs, one cube at a time. Artfully arranged. Then he poured water over it. Very pretty.



A floral display without flowers.



The hotel had just bought three matching new cars and had them blessed/Christened [no, not Christened...] ...had a car puja... and the license plate numbers are all in a row.

Sandra Dodd's Wild Rides

More video from auto rickshaws!

Dusk, Laxmi Road in Pune, the stores with their lights on:

Here's the preview to the one above, a wild wait, while Pradnya got a second rickshaw and then gathered our party together so we could go back to her mom's place where she had left her car.

Another day, another auto; same part of town:

Beauty

Some of my favorite images from yesterday. I'm behind on processing thoughts and pictures both.

Arvind Gupta's science toys

Chitra arranged a brief visit to Arvind Gupta's lab/workshop on Friday. He designs science toys that can be made by street kids from easily obtainable Indian trash. His site is linked below. Here's a brief video I made that day:


http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/
He showed us the balancing nails trick (which they have at Explora in Albuquerque, too).

There was a flexagon with drawings of stages of evolution. In this video (linked from his site, to YouTube) he shows a food chain. Any four-part series could be illustrated on those, he said. (He told us who discovered/created this design first, too, but I don't remember the name, so if anyone does know, please leave a note.


Pictures of the building in which he and his team work, and some of the things we saw:

Highway traffic with Christmas music

On the piece of cardboard on which I've been taking notes on which photos to delete and which are brooms and whatnot, I had noted: "Good 1454.mp4" I can't say at the moment what I thought was good about it, but I will trust my notes from day before yesterday and share it.

flag/palm/moon

I wasn't tall enough to get the flag fully. Had I backed up more, other trees would have been between me and the moon. It was getting dark and getting cloudy at the same time. It's not a great photo, but will be a memory jogger for me. I was in the driveway of Pradnya's mom's house.

Outside the zoo

I thought I would bring something interesting since I might not get time for a careful post today:



Kids' rides, and all the sounds, outside the ticket booth of the zoo.

Sari shop

I got to be in a fancy sari shop while Chitra bought a sari for her mother-in-law. Because she wanted a typical local sari, Pradnya was advising.

This is the second floor (third, by American reckoning)--there was another place over the entry room). Shoes off for this one, and the floor was covered in pads about 3" thick, like old-style futons. There were three salesmen, and when we came in they indicated a corner for us to sit, and brought me a plastic stool (which I didn't mind, because I was really tired and would've had an awkward get-back-up).


Behind me was the entry, where the shoes were, and the windows to the street. I should've just captured everything, but I was the last of the people in our group, and anyway one can't capture everything.

When we went downstairs to pay, I started to do a 360° view, but was interrupted by a man having brought me a chair. How nice of him! How rude to interrupt my nosy, touristy capture of his store, though. :-)

Pradnya says, "Sandra, he's getting you a chair," so I stopped.



I'm scheduled to be back down on that street again before I leave, so I'll try to get a shot of the front of the store to add here.