lines and dots

i always thought of indian tattoos as random (but so pretty) designs
made with aesthetic considerations, not emotional ones
certainly not as over-thought-through as western tattooing has become
today people would look at you funny if you said you wanted a tattoo just because it "looks pretty"
but tribal tattoo art is often made with just that one basic purpose, and what's wrong with that?

but yesterday yashoda, our vegetable seller, showed me a different aspect of tribal tattooing


this is yashoda's fore arm with one of her many, many tattoos. the top most pattern with the lines and dots is my favorite and i intended to get it someday
and yesterday i loved it more when she told me it was in fact not lines and dots
but stick figures of girls holding hands
representing her childhood spent playing with her girlfriends

indian tattoos, i realized, tell a story too
there on yashoda's body are symbols of her childhood, flowers representing her village--her home, and later her husband's name and a bindi showing her married life. the two stick figures below in this picture i believe are her two children.

i hope to get these tattoos someday, in this indian style with the greenish ink and thick, rough needles so looked down upon by western tattooing. yashoda apparently got these from a woman sitting outside a railway station once for three rupees each! of course, the likelihood of me allowing a three rupee needle in my arm is zero. hopefully someday one of our "professional" tattoo artists will take up the cause of reviving and mainstreaming indian tattoo art. i don't know why it hasn't happened already.

p.s. for some really beautiful pictures of tribal tattoos from kutch, do visit one of my favorite new flickr streams, "the meanest indian", and this set of tribal tattoos. the clothes, the tattoos, the silver... gorgeous!

"the world with tibet"

yesterday i attended a film screening organised by the friends of tibet and presented by tenzin tsundue who i last saw at the jaipur lit fest. i've been finding myself more and more interested in buddhism and wanted to know how a buddhist nation fights for freedom. turns out, it doesn't. it just quietly marches along and keeps repeating its request over and over as loudly as it can. the film, "the sun behind the clouds", was a good primer on the tibetan freedom struggle. first there was tenzin tsundue smiling, with that signature hair. then he was on the screen with a military buzz cut, getting ready to be arrested.

so on one hand is the dalai lama who travels the world, lives in a lovely home in dharamsala, speaks of love and freedom and non violence. and then there are the tibetans who live as oppressed minorities in tibet or as refugees outside it, cry for him to return to tibet and lead the movement and lie prostrate every time they see him on the tv. why is there always such a distance between us and those we worship. isn't it easy to be god when you don't have to live in human reality?

when we went to ladakh, i often saw world maps and globes in cyber cafes and restaurants with tibet drawn onto them with a felt tip pen. yesterday, they gave us these maps with tibet represented as a large white area. it says, "the world with tibet." the map's gone up on this random grid of things on my wall. there, now my world has tibet.

one of two things

Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo.

flavors.me's new demo video. it really is awesome how simple + pretty it is. seems it took a helluva long time for someone to make a website creation service that's this braindead simple and delivers a really good looking result. but at last.

another website that's awesome on the simple-but-pretty front is aviary, which is a web-based photo/video/audio editing service with tools exactly like photoshop etc. i have no idea why it's free to use, it's that good. the learning curve there is a lot more than with something like flavors, but its usp isn't simplicity but giving people access to the tools of otherwise expensive softwares.

i think everyone should just do one of two things with their lives--make stuff or make it easy for others to make stuff.

flay-vur

http://flavors.me/tanushri

my new website
(whose background image changes with my mood)
is a compilation of everything i do online
hosted on flavors.me, a really sweet, simple service
that recently started allowing registrations
the url is a little dinky at the moment
but i'm working on it