Stopgap post

Apologies, reader, for the recent drought in posts. This past week I've been working pretty steadily on launching JVF's website (which just launched today!). I haven't really picked up my camera in the mean-time, simply because I haven't been doing much besides commuting back and forth from work.

The farm I live on, Anokhi Farm, has a car which drives from the farm to the Anokhi Cafe on Pritviraj road (we affectionately call it the 'Cake Car', although it would be better described as the 'bread car', for its pervasive smell of freshly-baked wheat bread). Every day it leaves at around 9:15, and it's the only way for Georgie and I to get into the office at a reasonable hour.

Every day the cake car drives past a vast dirt lot abutted by the Kathputhali (puppeteer) colony. Scattered about the lot, in a reliably constant number (usually around 5-6), Indian men defecate on the dirt. Some are alone. Others are surrounded by their friends, a few unhurriedly waiting for a makeshift cricket match to begin.

The Kathputhali are manufacturers of traditional puppets. Traditionally, the Kathputhali made puppets for shows portraying old tales of love, misfortune, and courtly intrigue. As with most castes involved in the manufacture of arts and craft, their position in the social hierarchy has always been rather low.

With the (relatively) recent advent of the internet, films and television, their craft has been quite instantaneously rendered useless. Now they occupy a kind of shantytown on the edge of a lot, about two blocks away from the parliamentary building of Jaipur. (Note: I will post photographs of the Kathputhali village when I have the chance this weekend or next week).

The Kathputhali shantytown borders one of the main boulevards leading to the parliament building, and the village's disgraceful state has given rise to one of Jaipur's more interesting monuments: the tallest wall outside of the old city. Towering at over fifteen feet high, the wall is decorated with quaint and delicate drawings evocative of the frescoes on the walls of havelis in the pink city. That the feeble vestiges of a dying caste of craftsman would be walled in by decorations evocative of their own extinct art is an irony lost on all but the cosseted few who have enough pity left to look out the window of their car at it as they drive by.

And if a problem is so inexorable as to be impossible to carry in one's mind, let alone come up with a solution to, is it still a problem?