Early in 2005 my
dear friend and creative partner at the time, Spiros Antonopoulos and I were
trying to come up with our next project as well as a way to fund a trip to
Mysore to attend the celebration for Pattabhi Jois’ 90th birthday.
After some brainstorming and soul searching we decided to do “Gently Down”.
Inspired by a story
we heard that Lee "Scratch"
Perry used to bury his tapes in his back yard for some years to get extra tonal
diversity and do rituals to empower them, we came up with this idea. We would screen print
an image of the Goddess Ganga on a series of T-shirts and take them on a
spiritual pilgrimage through India where they would be bathed in the Ganges at
Haridwar, washed and beaten on the stones of the river’s bank at Uttarkashi and
blessed in the temple at Gangotri in the Himalayan mountains.
The concept was
that even if you could not make it to India, you could follow your shirts
journey as we travel blogged it’s progress. We also wanted to take a mundane
item like a t-shirt and see it go through a process of transformation,
purification and blessing by the water element. It’s hard to imagine now that
internet live blogging was in it’s infancy in 2005, but it was. And we failed
to anticipate the obstacles we were about to encounter, like115 degree heat,
monsoon rains, me losing the cable for the camera, lack of internet access
north of RIshikesh and the fight we had hiking through the Himalayas that
resulting in us not speaking to each other for 3 days…..And Spiros got
hypothermia after bathing in the Ganges at Gaumukh, the geological source of
the river that is located at a glacier.
I will spare the
reader the many ups and downs we experienced on our mission and jump to the conclusion.
The shirts and us made it up and back from Haridwar to the Himalayas and
finally down to Mysore in time for the festivities. All 108 shirts were sold
which allowed me to pay my credit card bills that we used to front the trip. We
even got to stay and practice at the yoga school in Mysore for a couple of months.
And most importantly, I think I can say with confidence that we had 108 very
satisfied shirt recipients.
Bathed at Haridwar
Beaten at Uttarkashi
Blessed at Gangotri
Each shirt was packaged in a custom made canvas carry bag and came with a bottle of Ganga water collect at Gaumukh.
You can see more photo of the trip HERE
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