I didn't expect that we would be such a novelty - Bangalore is a big city, and even when we travelled around, we didn't go anywhere remote or off the the tourist track. But several times people came up to us and asked to have a photo taken with us. I don't know if it was just being white, or being a group of white women of varying ages - but it happened several times.
In the botanical gardens in Bangalore it was a couple of young female students, and later some giggling little girls; at Bheemeshwari a young couple with a baby boy; on the beach at Kochi Fort a whole family. Perhaps the weirdest occasion for me was when we went to watch the fruit bats fly out from the park by the Big Bull Temple in Bangalore. There were several young men in their twenties hanging around and staring at us in a way that I initially found quite intimidating. I assumed they were interested in my two nieces - only a few years older than them - but it turned out they were equally interested in having their pictures taken with three women in their fifties. Bizarre!
Usually they had a phone and a friend to take the photo for them, but in one or two cases they actually just wanted us to take a photo of them with our cameras. So in my collection of photos I have a number of images of members of my family standing next to total strangers. I wonder if they think about it, and wonder what people back in England think about them. I certainly wonder where those photos of me and my family are now, and how people view us - friendly strangers or foreign oddities?
In the botanical gardens in Bangalore it was a couple of young female students, and later some giggling little girls; at Bheemeshwari a young couple with a baby boy; on the beach at Kochi Fort a whole family. Perhaps the weirdest occasion for me was when we went to watch the fruit bats fly out from the park by the Big Bull Temple in Bangalore. There were several young men in their twenties hanging around and staring at us in a way that I initially found quite intimidating. I assumed they were interested in my two nieces - only a few years older than them - but it turned out they were equally interested in having their pictures taken with three women in their fifties. Bizarre!
Usually they had a phone and a friend to take the photo for them, but in one or two cases they actually just wanted us to take a photo of them with our cameras. So in my collection of photos I have a number of images of members of my family standing next to total strangers. I wonder if they think about it, and wonder what people back in England think about them. I certainly wonder where those photos of me and my family are now, and how people view us - friendly strangers or foreign oddities?
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