Does "Indian Women Washing Baby Like A Cloth" not sound like the title of a piece of contemporary abstract art?
Actually it's the title of a fetching 48-second youtube video one of my Facebook friends shared on their page a few days ago.
And yet I would say that it is a piece of art, one that I find so fascinating - and enchanting - that I can't stop looking at it.
Here, check it out:
Indian Women Washing baby Like a Cloth
I like this moving photographic art piece so well that I wish I could frame it and hang it on a wall in my house somewhere, where the images of the women and babies would move all day long like the magic moving pictures from the Harry Potter stories.
Aside from the the story this picture tells of an Indian custom and culture that I, for one, had no Idea existed - communal baby baths, with special seats and foot-rests built just for washing a new born - there are all the left-out details of the story that one ponders while looking at the picture: Do the mothers bring their babies to the baths, or, as most of the women in this scene appear older, is baby-bathing the job of the grandmother? Or are these ladies baby maids who specialize in washing these tiny ones? Are all new-borns in India carted off to the communal bath, either by their mothers or grandmothers or maids or is this only how people who don't have bathrooms in their homes do it? Do well-off people have special baby-bathing areas in their homes?
The appeal of this moving picture has to be especially primal for anyone who's ever bathed a new born.
Admit it, everyone, unless your a neonatal nurse or something, it's frightening, right? And, if you're bathing the baby in a sink or little baby tub set up on the kitchen table or in the bath tub, it's clumsy and awkward trying to get into those nooks and crannies, not to mention getting the back side of the baby washed while you're holding baby up from behind.
All you folks who've done it know what I'm talking about.
And how do you rinse the soap out of baby's hair without getting into his or her little eyes?
For a new parent, these are great all-consuming issues.
But the method used by the Indian baby washers seems to have all those issues licked.
And they look to be engaged in community in a labor of love and joy.
Watching them makes me want to hold a newborn baby, even gives me the feeling that I wish I could try my hand washing a tiny newborn that way. Maybe just a time or two.
In any case, it's a reminder of the amazing and wonderful variety among people that still exists on our shrinking planet.
It's a work of art.
Actually it's the title of a fetching 48-second youtube video one of my Facebook friends shared on their page a few days ago.
And yet I would say that it is a piece of art, one that I find so fascinating - and enchanting - that I can't stop looking at it.
Here, check it out:
Indian Women Washing baby Like a Cloth
I like this moving photographic art piece so well that I wish I could frame it and hang it on a wall in my house somewhere, where the images of the women and babies would move all day long like the magic moving pictures from the Harry Potter stories.
Aside from the the story this picture tells of an Indian custom and culture that I, for one, had no Idea existed - communal baby baths, with special seats and foot-rests built just for washing a new born - there are all the left-out details of the story that one ponders while looking at the picture: Do the mothers bring their babies to the baths, or, as most of the women in this scene appear older, is baby-bathing the job of the grandmother? Or are these ladies baby maids who specialize in washing these tiny ones? Are all new-borns in India carted off to the communal bath, either by their mothers or grandmothers or maids or is this only how people who don't have bathrooms in their homes do it? Do well-off people have special baby-bathing areas in their homes?
The appeal of this moving picture has to be especially primal for anyone who's ever bathed a new born.
Admit it, everyone, unless your a neonatal nurse or something, it's frightening, right? And, if you're bathing the baby in a sink or little baby tub set up on the kitchen table or in the bath tub, it's clumsy and awkward trying to get into those nooks and crannies, not to mention getting the back side of the baby washed while you're holding baby up from behind.
All you folks who've done it know what I'm talking about.
And how do you rinse the soap out of baby's hair without getting into his or her little eyes?
For a new parent, these are great all-consuming issues.
But the method used by the Indian baby washers seems to have all those issues licked.
And they look to be engaged in community in a labor of love and joy.
Watching them makes me want to hold a newborn baby, even gives me the feeling that I wish I could try my hand washing a tiny newborn that way. Maybe just a time or two.
In any case, it's a reminder of the amazing and wonderful variety among people that still exists on our shrinking planet.
It's a work of art.
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