Shiarapatna and Pujas

We had heard that there was a town near Bangalore where stone sculpting is still a very active profession. We asked people about it and some one knew of the place but could not remember where it is. We asked more people and finally found mention of it on the web. "Shiarapatna". It does not appear on our maps, but this is not unusual- the maps that exist generally show only larger towns and cities. On Saturday we road off to see if we could find the place. Our friend Anita, who has lived here in Bangalore for a long time did not know about the town either, so she wanted to come along. It took us close to 2 hours to find it, but we did find the village. We stopped and looked at the pieces being carved out of granite. The first place we stopped they told us- mostly in Kannada- the local language- through Josef about the two kinds of granite they carve. One is light gray and considered lower quality while the other is dark gray and considered higher quality. We found these a bit dull, but the sculptures were interesting to see. Nearly all are religious figures for Hindus. We also saw some columns being carved. The quality was good, but we found there were not a lot of details in the carvings that make you say "wow!" This and the gray colors seemed dull, though they showed us pictures of some that had been painted in glorious bright colors. We walked a little through the village and people were outside their houses carving stones all over the place. They seemed curious about us too. The kids liked to come close a look. It seemed clear that few foreigners come out to this place.
We enjoyed seeing a whole village who's livelihood centers around granite carving and were a little sorry that we didn't see anything we could buy that would support their work.
On the drive to find the village of Shiarapatna we happened to pass through another village where we saw large woven frames- perhaps bamboo or maybe palm- with large concentric circles of the same material on the frames. The space between the circles had pale yellow fluffy balls spread all over. We quickly realized that this was a silk farm! Apparently silk was once a huge industry in this area. It is still very popular, but seems a bit less so now. The yellowish fluffy things were coccoons. We got out of the car and attracted a lot of people following us as we looked. They showed us sillk worms that were just starting to form their coccoon and all th eothers where they were finishing. They gave us a few coccoons. They told us (in Kannada through Josef) that they get about 180Rs per KG for the raw silk. That is roughly $1.65 for 1 lb which is not a lot of money for silk. We gave the guy who was mostly welcoming 200 Rs for his showing us around and telling us about the silk. He tried to give it back, but Josef said he thought the guy was very happy. We may add some pictures later.
There are a lot of holidays around this time of year. It seems a little similar to the Thanksgiving- New Year period in the US. There are many "pujas"- this is often spelled other ways. These seem to be ceremonys of various sorts. Last weekend there was one in which all mechanical devices were given some sort of blessing. There are bits of paint and other colors at various places all over our apartment building from the ceremony. That particular one might be regarded as honoring professions, but much of it is directed at the machines.
For the past 4 evenings and sometimes early in the morning there has been some loud music and rather awful singing and speaking going on in our neighborhood. We do not know what it is about but they have placed loudspeakers around the neighborhood to blast the sound all around. They do end before 10PM, so at least, we can sleep. We presume this is related to one of the holidays, but do not know.