Posting to my blog from email...

Okay, this is painful. For the past two days, I've been restricted to
high priced internet access by dialup. This is killing me, but I
shouldn't have expected anything more, after all I'm now in a place
(Swamimallai) that I can't find anything written about in the guide
books.

I saw lots more temples today, got to snap off some shots of people in
rice paddies, and spent my 5th consecutive day in a downpour. From
now on, I won't trust Lonely Planet and other such resources, instead
I'll have to do some deeper digging to find out what the weather is
supposed to be like.

The reason for the stop in Swamimallai is to see a minor temple (after
all, I'm seeing the temple towns of Tamil Nadu), and to see a place
where they do lost wax casting of metal statues. "What's lost wax
casting?" I hear you ask, well bear with me a few minutes and I'll
explain.

Have you ever seen those Indian statues that are made of a hard metal
or amalgom like brass? Well, you can't really chisel the entire thing
out of a solid block, so there must be a better way of doing things.
What they do, is make the statue out of beeswax mixed with a resin.
They can put relatively intricate things together fairly quickly, but
for really detailed pieces, it takes a long time. The wax moulders
work pieces with their hands, and heat either their bare hands, or the
wax over coals. The wax statues are then encased in a clay. The clay
is then fired to make it hard, and in the process, the wax drips out
the hole left for it in the bottom. Now you have a rough negative.
You then heat the mould, and pour in molten metal at about the same
temperature as the mould. Then let it all cool and break the mould.
What you have is the overall statue, and it can then be painstakingly
polished and chiselled.

The end results are truly one offs, as they can't reuse the broken
moulds. Some guy set up a workshop here in Swamimallai, and has
gained an international reputation for his work. The Indian
goverment's Archaeological Survey has even misclassified some of his
works as antiques becuase up until recently no one else did things in
the same manner that he did (using the same metal amalgom etc).

The resulting pieces are a bit pricey, but if anyone wants custom
pieces, these are the guys to use. They've spent 10 years putting
together a 21 foot diameter Nataraja, and figure that it's going to
take them another 9 years to finish. There's no client for this
piece, the guy running the shop, Rajan, just wants to make the Guiness
Book of Records. Since they can handle shipping things, it seems to
me like they're the perfect people to do 6ft. tall Ganeshas, if you
know anyone interested in one.

I hope that this gets published, I can't get into blogger, so I'm
emailing blogger my blog post in the hopes that it publishes. By
tomorrow night I should be back to the world of fast connections, and
reliable service.

Bye for now.