Credits/Notes:
The sims are Black Taj and White Taj: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Black%20Taj/120/35/52
The White Taj is modeled after the Taj Mahal and the Black Taj is a product of imagination.*** These are ethereal, unreal, gorgeous builds with so much to explore and discover; each time I go I am surprised by something. Perhaps there are a few too many stores and billboards about, but a sim's gotta make money and I can respect that.
One of the happy by-products of this blog is all the lazy, meandering "learning" I tend to do in order to put a post together. It goes something like this: I visit a sim, which, besides making me want to take photos, gets me interested in some topic (e.g. Chinese brush painting, the Taj Mahal). What follows are hours of procrastination from RL chores spent in Internet research, following tangents down rabbit holes and discovering things and people I probably should have already known about.
Rabindranath Tagore is one of those people. I came across a quote by him about the Taj Mahal and thus found the happy sweet-spot tangent of this post. A poet, novelist, musician, playwright and essayist, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 (the first non-Westerner to do so). He was from a wealthy Brahmin family, lived in luxurious mansions and floating barges, studied law in England, traveled the world and knew everybody of importance, was a cultural dignitary and proponent of Indian Independence (he was the one who started calling Gandhi by the honorific "Mahatma"), an influencer of poets like Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. He was a good friend of Yeats. Here' s a cute photo of him with Albert Einstein:
Why the hell didn't I know about him?
Anyway, I've read quite a few of his poems now, willy-nilly, not knowing the dates, or in what era of his life and career they are from, but what I've found I like, though they feel awfully indulgent: sun-dappled, idealized, spiritual, light-filled, sentimental, bordering on florid, almost too beautiful. Too much of them and you're in for a stomach ache. I feel like I need a dose Imagism, some Ezra Pound, some spare haiku as a bracing chaser to Tagore's syrupy wine.
The Spanish poet Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that "Tagore's wide appeal [may stem from the fact that] he speaks of longings for perfection that we all have ... Tagore awakens a dormant sense of childish wonder, and he saturates the air with all kinds of enchanting promises for the reader."
(Kind of like Second Life!)
His poems work perfectly for the, well, rather florid look I was going for in the photos I took at Black Taj/White Taj. I added a grain texture and light gaussian blur to them because I was trying to capture the feeling of antique, early 20th-century children's book illustrations. I can just imagine the book they're in, its worn hardcover, the embossed, faded title-- "Tales of Adventure from Old Hindustan" in serif script-- earthy, yellowed pages, the smell of enclosed musty attics, &c. &c.
All the clothes are either from Zaara or Mashooka Designs. I probably have about 75 percent of the creations in Zaara Kohime's store in my inventory, which is quite possibly too much for any one avatar to own, but also quite understandable if you're familiar with her beautiful designs. I'm also quite partial to Aradhana Voight's traditional Indian offerings at Mashooka, especially the intricate jewelry.
Here are their main store SLurls, but they both also have handy little shops in the White Taj/Black Taj itself:
Zaara: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Zaara/128/128/2
Mashooka Designs: http://slurl.com/secondlife/House%20Music%20Island/150/63/21
Photo 2: Menaka sari and Suvarna Kundan head jewel and nose ring, both from Zaara. Hair is Lua from Analog Dog.
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