An enigmatic smile. Frozen on a thousand faces, staring bizarrely, on every street. What do they know? Do they have a secret plan, in waiting? Will they rise up? Animate against their enslavers, forcing them to where terrible fashions, day after day.
In front of most, downmarket, clothes shops on Delhi’s streets can be found the same dummies, usually of one or other of two types. The older style, in brittle cream plastic, chipped, eerie and unchanged for years, looking like stills from a fifties sci-fi movie, an atomic family frozen by deathly rays. The other is the modern, metallic plasticised version, again like a figure from a sci-fi movie, this time from the nineties, made of liquid metal, Terminator style. There seem to be only these two types everywhere, as though there is only one manufacture who has updated their style only once in fifty years, or maybe its the shopkeepers, all buying the same, all following each other believing what is right for one is right for all, they know what they like and like what they know. That is their place in their world, to change would be to appear to others to think they are better than their station and this would be frowned upon by their peers, their perceived superiors and their self-perceived inferiors. A mirror on the society the shopkeepers live in, one where everyone has a perceived place in a forever stationary hierarchy, the rung on the ladder where someone is born is the rung they and their family stay, and their children, and their children’s children. a rung may break and they may slip down but the rung above is always just out of reach. Still they smile, the shopkeepers and their symbols of status quo, the dummies.
littlejonwest 