Street Rhythm in Mysore: The Maharaja’s Birthday

Getting to a city tired and sleepy, feet dragging, grabbing a morning chai, no points of reference… Eyes open, bust station, wow! No points of reference, nothing…The eyebrows are heavy and the city is a busy, grey, no contrasting normality. Mysore is moderately frantic, moderately colorful and busy… until a certain extent. Sipping the chai, speaking to my buttons, trying to solve IT problems and such, trying to place myself… Thoughts and time drag, swung by the tedious regular honking of the Indian traffic tradition. That’s when it hit me… The first time was just a whisper. It became a rattle and grew, all bold and intense. It became noise and defined itself into rhythm. This raw, untamed rhythm that invaded the once monotone arteries. Then it gathered with color. I remember jumping outside and spiked by that spectacle in front of me, I just dove… There was a crowd outside, chanting and dancing frantically, like hyperactives in New Orleans. Looking around me, there were colorful people in drag, clumsy giant puppets, that grooved in a ruminating, slow groove and other shy voyeurs… Took my camera, and dove. I bring you the result. A stranger walks into town and the city flash mobs him. That’s how I felt. I didn’t resist, went with the flow and danced the steps the drums taught me. It was the Maharaja’s birthday, they told me. Well, congratulations Maharaja, I think I’ll just enjoy your surprise…

Searching Temples, Finding the Country

Eighteen Kilometres… Let your feet tell you the way. Such a landscape deserves your thirst. Desert tinted temples, boulders and rocks, a semi desolate aura comes knocking at your eye sight… First impressions, always an eye feeder. Today I scrap the surface, trot the scenery and finding a little bit of the farming and luscious green covered fields. The simplicity of a smile at each corner, the big eyes of curiosity and the equal and respectful wave. In Hampi, if you look for the temples, you end up capturing a fragment of this frank and straightforward reality. I was missing the country already…

Eerie Hampi: Living the Surreal…

Hampi, Karnataka State. One of the strangest, ghostly towns I’ve ever visited. The town is located on an a World Heritage ruins, with temples and a devotional aura surrounding it. Massive boulders all around complete the scenery, giving it a sense of an ancient, kind of desolate soul. Eerie might be the right word, a total maze of rocks and temples where orientation can be a bit hard. In the centre of the sacred bazaar, people have been occupying the ruins, a situation that was put to an end with demolitions. Despite this, there’s still life, there’s still the busy toiling and every day hard work. How interesting it is, how people live in such an ancient place, in such a devotional one. What I bring you today is the profane, the everyday life of such a place. Framed by amazing natural beauty and holy temples…

The Scenery Speaks for Itself: Life on an Indian Train

I woke up to an increasingly flooding Goan morning. Too sleepy, got to the train station being no more than a faint projection of myself… Plan: sleep the whole 8 hours into Hospet, Karnataka. That was a good plan. What I wasn’t counting on… The beautiful landscape that jumped into the train windows, invading my horizons… Impossible to ignore. Green covered ridges, as far as the eye can see, misty peaks and a dense jungle that sharps the spears of your imagination. At the same time, this was one of the liveliest train rides I’ve ever had. From the passengers, to the creative cries of the food salesman, to the random people that came into the train curious to see what was going on… All of them looked especially touched by the world flashing by… Such great vibes…

Suddenly, the landscape totally changes, gets drier, flooded with yellow tones and looks like Monty Python’s 16 ton has landed on it. A different kind of beauty, with the sky stealing the scene a little bit.

Take the journey, open your eyes… you can sleep when you’re dead, right?