POV: iPad

Photo Courtesy WIRED-All Rights Reserved
I'm far from being a geek or remotely resembling one, but I still like gadgets provided they're useful and have a purpose...which brings me to the iPad.

Unless you're traveling in North Korea, you must've heard that Apple is launching its iPad in its stores this coming Saturday. I live not too far from its 14th Street store and I intend to walk by just to see the gawking crowds.

The New York Times' David Pogue has an interesting article (and well-balanced) titled Looking At The iPad From Two Angles which I found to be the most intelligent of whatever has been recently written about the device. He concludes the article with this:

"The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine. The only question is: Do you like the concept? "

And that's the question. The iPad is really a "looker" not a "doer"...in other words, like its midget cousin the iTouch, it'll be mainly used as a reader, as a viewer of text, of website (minus Flash), of emails, of pictures, and so forth. Its success or failure is also dependent on the available applications, current and future, which I understand are close to 1500 in number already.

So far, I haven't seen any merits for photographers to get one. I read somewhere that an enterprising photographer will buy a few and, when asked for his portfolios, will send them out to his best clients instead of the old-style books. I'm quite certain that the iPad will be great in impressively displaying our images, but that's all.

Will it be fun to have an iPad? Of course, but will it be useful? I don't know. I'll wait and decide in another 6 months. Let others be the testers.

WIRED has a roundup on the first reviews of the iPad.

The Sabarimala Pilgrimage: Asim Rafiqui

Photo © Asim Rafiqui-All Rights Reserved
It's always a pleasure to start off the month with a super interesting post.

Here's a religious event/festival that not only fires up my adrenaline and imagination, but whose descriptive details I savor with relish, particularly as these are written by one of my favorite writers, William Dalrymple, and photographed by one of my favorite photojournalists, Asim Rafiqui.

And naturally, this event (as one of the largest pilgrimage festival in southern India) will be added to my list of possible destinations for a photo~expedition in 2011 or beyond. Not as overhyped as the Kumbh melas, it's the sort of authentic event I would love to photograph and attend...and then produce photo-essays and audio slideshows. It is this kind of destination that I seek for my photo~expeditions, which are destination/event-driven rather than just hopscotching from one tourist spot to the other. The trek up to the temple takes a minimum of five hours on a crowded path and unfortunately, women aged 10-60 are excluded from the pilgrimage.

The festival is the Sabarimala pilgrimage, and it brings Hindus and Muslims together in a fashion that is seldom witnessed. It would be redundant for me to re-post what Dalrymple describes, so here is his article as published in The Guardian.

Here's Asim's post in his opus; The Idea of India, and in which he writes:

"Here, in this small town in Western Kerala, members of two communities have managed, through legend, lore and ritual, to create a shared spiritual and social space and bridged what many claim is an insurmountable divide. The Sabarimala pilgrimage, in the course of about forty days, will bring nearly 50 million pilgrims through this town, and to the Vavar mosque. The seventy kilometer trek from Erumeli to the mountain top shrine of the god Ayyappa at Sabarimala cannot be completed without first paying respects to his friend the Muslim pirate/saint Vavar and asking his permission to proceed."

Asim meets a guruswami who invites him to join his group to Sabarimala and, being of a different persuasion, assumes wrongly that the invitation was only rhetorical. As the guru leads his group towards the mountain shrine of Ayyappa, he waves and tells Asim that perhaps Ayyappan did not call him yet, but that when he was ready he'd ask him to come.

I hope Ayyapan includes me as well.

Paulette Waltz: Tibetans In Exile

Photo © Paulette Waltz-All Rights Reserved
Here's an audio slideshow of black & white photographs of the Tibetan community in Manali by Paulette Waltz.

There are 3 Tibetan monasteries in Manali; two of which are located in the main downtown area of Manali, while the third monastery is on the opposite bank of the Beas river. In common with other Tibetan communities, there are a number of handicraft stores and restaurants. The two I frequented -while teaching at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop- was Chopsticks (not much imagination in the name, but decent and cheap food) and the delightful Peace Cafe which served a wonderful granola and yogurt breakfast, as well as noodle soup and other staples.

Paulette Waltz lives and works in Tokyo, but was born and raised near Washington, DC. She pursued Psychology at Emory University, studying in Europe and Africa. Post-graduation, she traveled Asia and lived in northeast China as well as Japan. She developed her interest in photography in Namibia, where coming across photogenic Himba women.