before we get to the reflections i just wanted to share a few scenes from local farmers with a team of women laborers planting rice. it is hard work especially hard on the back but the down-to-earth women are strong, tough and cohesive. singing and talking eases their burden. the rice plant, called paddy is planted in shallow water provided from a traditional but surprisingly sophisticated irrigation system
while a family paddy field may be very large, siblings and/or cousins fence off their individual sections which they work and are responsible for
scarecrows do help to keep some animals and birds away but egrets are not deterred from searching for frogs, fish and whatever else they can eat. since the egrets don't cause any damage to the crop they are quite welcome to feed and defecate there, the farmers keep a close watch for other more destructive animals such as cows or monkeys
so now for the reflections. at first these may look like shadows. indeed in some of my shadowhunters posts shadows have been shown to do strange things, but these here in fact are reflections. the newly planted paddy makes it more difficult to distinguish but if you look carefully you can see the images have different colors. and while it is true that shadows have color, the colors in these reflections match the various colors of the women's clothing
while i don't know for sure, most likely the man in the striped shirt is the farmer
thousands of seedling paddy are planted one by one in the fecund mud under the water. at first glance some may view these reflections as inferior because the colors are so subdued that they appear to be shadows. to that i would answer it is that factor that gives the reflections a deeper, less obvious but more powerful significance.
the plants and the muddied water result from the women's labor and their reflection is cast on that labor, so it is their labor which causes the colors to be muted. and it is precisely because of the manual nature of their labor that society in general tends to underappreciate not only the value of their labor but attach a low status to the people themselves.
finally we have come to the contest entry which is the photo above
this photo is a close-up of the previous entry photo in order to better show the colors in the reflections. so i hope the next time you enjoy rice with your meal you will reflect on the amount of effort and endeavor that goes into farming a crop but even more so the beauty of that struggle.