We visited the largest of Jaisalmer's Jain temples today. An ornate stone labyrinth pregnant with symbolism. Like everywhere here it was packed with visitors snapping away on everything from battered smartphones with smashed screens to the latest digital slr cameras. Snap, snap, snap we all went until in the end the temple dissolved for me into a series of photo opportunities and I forgot entirely to actually look and take in the things I was supposedly trying to capture. I look down on the vacuous and self-absorbed fashion of taking selfies so that a distorted image of oneself becomes the star of one's own "B" movies, but am I any better?
Maybe compulsive picture taking is just another facet of our worship of the individual and their "experience". So, just as Jains come here to worship things I don't really understand, so I come to worship at the temple of experience, burning images onto an artificial retina to be shared or not at a later date with my friends and acquaintances as I construct another chapter in the story of my life.
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