DAILY PHOTO: The Colorful Side of Khajuraho
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For almost 900 years poor schlubs have had to scrub their way around this temple, washing its ornate carvings.
I wonder how similar or different the workers of past generations looked? Obviously, they didn’t have molded plastic water jugs, but the pottery version might have looked similar (not the day-glo lime green one, but certainly the brick-colored one.) No dress shirts or ball caps back then, but the turbans and sarongs are probably not so out-of-place.
Of course, the scaffolding, rough-cut wood lashed together, gives it an ancient feel.
Probably, the most striking difference is the female job foreman.
Traveling cross-country through Cambodia at the end of the wet season, the road seems to be just the Mac-daddy paddy dike, and the rest of the country is a flooded rice paddy. What once was jungle is now solitary trees, often palms, jutting out of a verdant sea. Farmers fish waist deep, casting nets, as emaciated oxen cool their bellies. Everyone lives and dies by water.