I challenge you to tell me the last time you have had yourself captured in a state of Positive Flow – that is, a state in which you were so completely absorbed in living through a pleasurable experience as to be unaware of anything else around you.

Need to think a while for the recall, eh?

I’ll bet that you do not have even a handful of photographs that faithfully record such an event in your life, apart from those wonderfully raw and nostalgic captures of you as a kid, bringing the house down with your antics.

Why? Because we got programmed into putting in 80 hour work weeks, with no spare attention to ration it for life’s true pleasures.

We were all once kids; curious about everything and delighting in the flow experiences that we would so easily get into. But, then we grew up and got an education.

We willingly participated in getting ourselves programmed into mastering skills that someone else, in most cases a large corporation, uses to make this world “a better place”. We now give it our loyalty, time and the bulk of our energies in exchange for security and social standing. The rest of the time is spent on living the “good life”: buying an impressive house, a car and and all other trappings that reminds us of our progress.

Programmed by world wide media to believe that sensory stimulation is the fountainhead of pleasure and meaning, we at the same time are being condemned to lives of hard work and toil just to gather a nice place to live, to take care of our health and to fend for our families. These tasks, the most basic needs of ours, consume the entire useful period of a man’s life – his youth and middle age. We humans have been programmed to be driven primarily by fear and greed.

And, all of our attention goes into just maintaining the status quo.

In Finding Flow, the author states that in the least technologically developed societies, people spend about 4 hours a day providing for their livelihood, and spend the rest of their time relaxing, chatting, singing and dancing.

Are we, light years ahead in our sophistication, any happier than they are?

One of the drawbacks of our society today is that it is driven by economics. And in such societies, the useful, functional side of man is being emphasized over all others, leading to plenty of repressed feelings in the masses. Society encourages only those moves which are socially acceptable and which generate something of value for others to consume. And, it offers a multitude of ways for man to achieve this narrow objective, while shutting off all other means of perception of life.

My intent is to capture people in states joy and abandon, and to make them aware of the gentle, co-operative and fun-loving facets of their personality they might possibly have missed out on while being too busy making a living.

My intent is to capture their Moments of Virtue.

And, what better stage than an Indian wedding to do that?

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