Rapid...

Once the date is set there are so many things to finish on time. Making sure all the products are hire, all the stationery, the collaterals, interior details, last minute orders....its such a rush...expectantly awaiting the signage that should come tomorrow....somehow there are these small things that make it seem like its very real....a little price tag or a shopping bag...now I know that it is definitely going to happen!

So...two videos and a small story...
A friend of mine was working on a story for a magazine about FabIndia and John Bissell (founder of Fabindia). John Bissell was very fond of Ikkat and worked with weavers from Koyalgudem, a village very close to Pochampally. Pochampally mainly weaves silk Ikkat, usually in a saree format. Koyalgudem does mostly cotton fabric in large quantities. Bissell with the help of Suraiya Hassan (video about her in an earlier post) used a lot of Ikkat and helped the weavers in coming up with new designs, brighter colors...the weavers in Koyalgudem compare John Bissell and Suraiya Hassan to Gods...the village thrived at one point being a place of great business....now when you see it, there is only run down houses, all the stores that used to sell the fabrics are boarded up, fewer and fewer people are weaving now. One of the weavers we met said that it is difficult to get cotton and the price they get for finished fabric has not changed while the price of cotton has increased multifold. There is also new industries coming up around the village where daily laborers get paid more than how much the weaver would make. There used to be a dignity attached to being a weaver and now there is simply poverty...

This is a spindle machine that prepares the threads for the loom. Master weavers have this machine as well as looms, while there are some people who just do the preparation and earn very little while doing that.

This is a video of two men dyeing the prepared threads. One of them is wearing gloves while the other isn't. I was there, I saw the dyes, and they were very strong chemicals. Also the lack of footwear had caused a lots of wounds on the feet of not just these men but also the women living in the house. The dyers make the least money in this hierarchy of weaver and people doing the preparatory work. 

Just some things that were on my mind for a while...sharing them...hoping we can do something about this...