Because we have about 1.5GB of photos and video clips from India (granted, most of those video clips are of driving), the process of sorting through the photos has been overwhelming. Luckily for me, my lovely wife has taken care of the vast majority of sorting of the photos, and has put them up on her Yahoo! Photos site. I think we’re still in need of better captions, and I can’t seem to find the Taj Mahal photos in any of the sets, but once that’s all squared away, I’ll post
links to that here.

But for now, what I’m going to do is write a few smaller posts based on a few photos, in a segment I like to call “Representative Image: India Edition”. Here’s the first installment now!

THIS THING IS LOUD AND AWESOME

While we were in the state of Gujarat, we travelled by road to a few places to see some temples. My family has roots in a town called Balambha. In this town, we were whisked around from small temple to small temple, all the while not really knowing what was going on, other than that these were temples. This was due to my barely-there grasp of Gujarati (the language). Whatever we were doing, it was stuff that’s supposed to lead us to having a good and auspicious marriage. Most of it involved “praying” and eating bits of coconut.

However, at one of the temples, we came upon this giant electric drum machine. This caught my eye, and I asked about it… As a demonstration, he turned the thing on. IT WAS LOUD. Really loud. We actually jumped, startled, when he flipped the switch. The mechanical mallets beat that drum with immense force. We were told it was “to wake up the gods”. It’s probably also to alert everyone within a mile radius that it’s time to wake up and come to temple. Someone with more Hinduism-cred may want to comment on that, but that’s what they said. Inside the thing there were also bells of some kind that played in rhythm with the drum. It’s a really cool sound; we actually heard one from farther away at my grandmother’s house in Rajkot, and it was great. Being that close to it, though, takes away most of the enjoyment.

I should try to get my hands on one and use it on my next recording. Well, not really. It is quite an impressive piece of musical machinery though.