Women hit back at India's rape culture

Being in India in that crucial period while the 23-year-old medical student was gang raped and struggling for her life in hospital was an experience that will stay with me forever. The general righteousness and fairness that i expect to meet in life is a prerogative. My sense of security in life stems from the fact that I was born and have grown up in a Western society where the law is reality. So many women live in a society where even if they do have the right of sexual consent or reproductive rights, the society or police will not act upon allegations with due respect to the woman.



This is the story as I've gathered it from BBC and general articles around: The case of the student in the Delhi-rape was that she and her friend were walking around looking for an auto (tuk-tuk) outside the biggest mall Select City-Walk. Seeing as they were going far none of the drivers were willing to take them. This type of night time haggling is a pastime that you will end up spending a lot of time on if you decide to live in Delhi. Then they jump onto a bus - the decision that turned out to be the worst thing they could do. The driver had simply invited his friends for a ride after hours. It was a mistake of the couple to jump on that bus, and it was awful what those psychos did to her. But the awful thing doesn't end when they are kicked out of the bus. The scary part was for me to realise that naked, beaten up and blood streaming down their bodies they were running around the streets looking for help and not finding any. Auto's, taxis, trucks, people in their shiny white cars all refused to help them get to a hospital.

Getting involved in a case like this would take up your time and money - you could end up being suspect if you don't pay enough bribes with the way the Indian justice system malfunctions. When finally they manage to get hold of the police, the poor incompetent officers had to decide which hospital to bring the couple to. Because of the bureaucracy involved they couldn't bring her to the nearest (private) hospital, but had to take them to a propped government hospital with a queue that didn't exactly help getting her to a doctor any faster. The story shows that not only are there too many rapes happening in Delhi, but there is a profound fault with the justice system and bureaucracy involved even in emergencies.

The amazing thing that happened after the sad death of the victim December 29th was that women of all backgrounds started caring. They joined forces and told the men that they would no longer accept the treatment as sex objects any longer. I experienced how men would stare, lick their lips in lust and grope my privates as I passed by. I learned to lower my eyes and by New Years Eve I was prepared for the party scene in Goa where we accidentally ended up in a not-so-touristy club with way too many men. Twice in the first 15 minutes on the dancefloor i managed to grab the arm touching my ass and hit the guys. I seemingly got respect from that and as far as I remember the strangers left me to dance the night away with my friends.

The Red Brigade is a group of women in Lucknow who has gathered to end sexual harassment and abuse by learning self-defence and exercise punishment of the local men. Now, I'm not in favour of taking the law into your own hands as the Red Brigade do when they beat up men. But upon the realisation that the police really is corrupt, that the legal system does not function and this is the only realistic option for these women I have come to the conclusion that it has to be the way of India's women. Women in India need to prove their strength and unison. Until the legal and bureaucratic system gets fixed, physical come-backs and threats will have to educate the men of India on women's worth.

Speaking of rights and in the terms of third wave feminism will not help in India. India will go through their own waves of feminism, and all feminists in the west can do is to look at this in awe and write long blogs about it. We can show our support and facilitate learning, but it's their own fight with a part of their own culture that we can only try to understand. The women need to learn their rights and the men who don't get it need to be retaliated upon. It's a fantastic new era for these women and their daughters.

Dastkar Nature Bazaar

I've been too much away and too busy travelling this past month. Diwali in the desert was amazing and now that I'm packing and getting ready to leave Delhi I thought I'd just share a few pictures from the previous Nature Bazaar held by Dastkar.

Market stalls - you can see Malkha from where I got fabrics from at a previous market. I can't wait to receive the final piece from my tailor tomorrow.

Amazing camel leather bags with Gujarati emboridery.

  

The fair provides the biggest choice of fair trade, naturally dyed, hand spun scarves and bags that I've ever seen.

This is a detail shot of a sari that I simply had to return for when Diwali parties came closer. The peacocks are painted by hand in a technique called kalamkari.

At a friend's Diwali party with SartorialDiary

If you want to visit the Dastkar market in Delhi there is supposedly a chance again this December. Keep yourself posted on their facebook-page where people will start asking for the dates long before they are published. The location is walkable from Chhatarpur station and the food is great too.


UPDATE: the winter bazaar in the theme of Winter Weaves will be running from 20th to 25th December.

Navratri Festivities in Gujarat

Last week I had one of my most exhilarating experiences ever. I went to Ahmedabad in Gujarat for Navratri, a festival celebrating that the goddess Durga fought a demon for 9 days and in the end succeeded because of her feminine strengths, I think. There's a wiki page here, but the most important thing is the Garba. The Garba ground is a massive circle where people dance the traditional steps back-and-forth-round-and-clap-back-and-forth-clap-step-back-step-forth.

My couchsurfing hosts told me that many of the women save up to this festival all year, spend months sewing their costumes, often with different outfits for each day. But not only the women dress up, the men are dressed in equal grandeur and have trained just as much. The most children in Gujarat are born 9 months after Navratri. The splendid dress and mesmerizing dancing creates an atmosphere out of the ordinary in an otherwise alcohol-free state.

So many of the women's outfits were breathtaking. And when you realise that all the colours are embroidered you feel like stopping them all from dancing so wildly and taking them all to a museum, but of course that would be a horrible idea. I was so inspired and in love with it all. We weren't allowed to bring in cameras, but fortunately nobody minded having their picture taken when I asked.

The girl in the first picture was an amazing 10-yearold girl who practically kidnapped me away from the people I went with. She showed me the steps and her friends laughed with me so hard at my clumsiness. I think several hours went by in an instant until her elder sisters joined. At one point we found a group of more than 20 men doing what can best be described as sit-up-dancing. They were sitting in a circle on the floor shaking their hands over their heads as they moved their upper bodies back and forth. We joined them and got a great work-out.

The event was live-streamed every day. If you want to see me catching a breath, I'm standing behind some dancing Europeans around 1h 34m into the clip above. In retrospect these videos are actually quite trippy, and I suggest you put them on to celebrate an epic Halloween party. Around 30min into the clip below we start chanting and praying. It was quite a magical moment as all the lights went off and we were left with the candles that we held in our hands.

After the days in Ahmedabad Indian Rails decided to mess a little with my tickets, and instead of going further into the countryside I went to Baroda. I spent my time there with a great couchsurfer who literally lives and works at night and sleeps in the day. He works with internet marketing, but is considering to become a tourist guide in the daytime. With his friends we went for Navratri celebration at the Fine Arts campus, Jalebis (traditional sweets eaten on the last day of Navratri), then a rooftop party. When all that was over he showed me Old Baroda and the vegetable market as the hustle and bustle of the city started just before sunrise.

The Fine Art students had taken clues from recent trends into their dresses that were more simplistic and there were no microphones. Just drums and the shrieks of their joy.

Sweet Jalebis are being cooked in pure ghee (clarified butter)

The vegetable market as it opens up to the vegetable wallahs who will sell these further in local markets.

Style from Delhi Fashion Week

 Finally managed to do a little edit of the street style photos I took at Fashion week.
 

Just thought I'd put together these two strangers. The front-row woman had such a calm energy emanating from her, the Japanese buyer so restless.

Kiran, founder and designer of Myoho Studio.

Prateeq wears bracelets and a naturally dyed scarf that he made with techniques he learnt from village-people in rural India.

Day Four at Delhi Fashion Week

It's not exactly my day four, but that's what my entry card said. With the last day coming up tomorrow it was time for the up-and-coming designers to show what they had in store. First I went to a combined show of three young designers.

Kallol Datta 1955 is run by a graduate from CSM and it shows. The strong lines, the quirky print on structured garments all kept in the monotone made me temporarily wish all colours away. However, tonight I decided to colour it in a little anyway. So here are my runway pictures and doodles:

 

Please take an extra moment admiring those shoes before we go on to Anand Bushan and Rimzim Dadu. I have to say straight out that during the shows of those designers I lost track a little. There were too many looks and sub-collections. Also, my camera went a little fussy (nope, I'm not yet the photographer I was hoping to have become after thousands of pics in Jaipur).

Anand Bushan had a lot of mystically sparkling triangle pieces all worked around a fresh blue.

My camera really went crazy during Rimzim Dadu's show. I wish I had captured the final looks of lushy green sequins. I will update this space when find better coverage. Although the collection as a whole had some looks that needed discarding, there was really a lot of good pieces.

Gaurav Gupta SS13 - Delhi Fashion Week Day 3

Monday I managed to catch some catwalk action since apparently a student ID from a renowned fashion college gives you access to the show venues. Somehow my friend knew someone, who knew someone, who had extra passes for Gaurav Gupta.

 All photos in this post @SartorialDiary

The show was divided in two parts. The one I didn't like screamed early noughties, and took its inspiration from Christina Aguilera's white baggy pants. The styles above are all from the other half of the show. The shoes are gorgeous, reminding me of an old Miista style that I loved to bits, but in fresh neon colours and an interesting blocky heel. The fabrics looked so soft, the collars so fierce yet elegant and the colour combinations - absolutely incredible. (Just see the yellow shoes with the blue and white dress above).

There is little coverage from Will's Lifestyle India Fashion Week, but I did find Strut120 who create a slideshow of all the best looks.

Running For Fabric

Yesterday I spent the afternoon rummaging around Old Delhi, Chandni Chowk market for traditional Indian fabrics. That's a very difficult task I tell you. It was hot, steamy but fantastic. The cloth market is a labyrinth of tiny shops, selling over-the-top-embellished kurta fabrics from a vast range of polyesters in every colour combination imginable. The women's lanes are filled to the brim with women discussing styles and prices. In comparison the men's lanes are almost depression-inducing with the choice of grey trouser fabrics and almost an absence of people. (Almost, we're still in India).

Here's one of the shops, behind is a look through to the lane behind it.

After giving up in Chandni Chowk I kept my spirits high and took a ride around Connaught Place with some autorickshaws who were certain some of the commission-paying tourists shops would have what I was looking for. That of course didn't help, but today I was lucky enough to stumble across a brand of natural dye, hand printed fabrics and it turns out they have an exhibition and pop-up shop going on. It opened yesterday exactly in the place where I was driving frantically around to the tourist shops. Oh well, at least I know where to go tomorrow!

10 Reasons Why Factories Don't Pay A Living Wage (And Why They Suck)

Inspired by Ecouterre's recent article '10 Biggest Excuses For Not Paying A Living Wage (And Why They Suck)' I've decided to try and explain what I have seen and heard since I arrived here in India. There is an understanding that it is the multinational companies who pay the garment workers, when in fact it is relatively small manufacturers employing between 400 and 1,000 workers at each plant. To understand the wage system then, we can't forget the middlemen. These owners of the manufacturing units are the people squeezed between powerful corporations and penniless workers and rising raw material costs with an expectation to be making big time money.

Here are my first four reasons why factories don't pay a living wage (and why they suck)...

The entrance to a garment factory fully equipped with security and 'No Child Labour' signs

1. When a buyer places an order, she does so on the basis of the price

The fashion industry has built a system in which buyers can demand free product development services from the manufacturer in return for the prospect of an order. Therefore the buyer will ask several manufacturers to develop the same pattern for the same style, in the end she chooses only one. In theory it enables the buyer to choose the manufacturer with the best eye for detail and quality of product. Practically it only comes down to price. If the products are pretty basic in design it's all about being the manufacturer in the run who dares to go 5 cents lower than the rest. For more complex products the buyer will choose the best design and use the offer from the other manufacturer to exert pressure on the manufacturer to go cheaper. If the manufacturer continuously puts his prices too high, he will not receive these offers in the future.

It may seem ridiculous that a few pennies make such a big difference for a company. It certainly doesn't for the customer to whom adding 40p to the price is not a big deal; £4.99 or £5.39. But considering an order for a million t-shirts this increase is suddenly £400,000. Clothing retailers are holding on to their margins with sharpened claws these days all the while customers are becoming more and more price sensitive and increasingly waits for the sale. Buying clothes at discount only gives one message to the retailer: "I want my products cheaper". It doesn't exactly say: "I want your margins to be lower".

2. The workers are lucky enough to have a job

The most common excuse for not paying a living wage is that workers are already being paid the lawful minimum wage, or that they are lucky enough to be off the streets. And it's true. Garment workers are better off than the poorest part of the Asian population, and the producers of garments for exports to the West are even better off than the majority of garment workers altogether.

But that doesn't mean the situation fine. If development goes in the direction that even the outsourced workforce are paid a better price, then maybe fabric suppliers can start demanding decent wages and so the chain will expand. In the end the drivers and servants will be able to make enough money for their families. The vegetable sellers and all the merchants are inclined to gain better sales too. The prospect of the garment sector to influence the entire economic development of the region is massive. Every little payment of a decent wage is a promise of a future with less people in poverty. And that's why they are not just lucky enough to have a job; workers can become mediators of positive change.

 Just one of the many rooms in a very unorganised factory

3. If workers are paid too much they will become lazy

This is the most ridiculous argument that I have heard. Fortunately I haven't directly heard it from a factory owner, but the argument circulates as an example of bad leadership at my college. Some of my lecturers who studied ways to improve the health of embroidery workers found that giving them a simple angular table would enable them to save their backs. In their study of quality control workers they found that a bar stool would be significantly better for their legs and backs. However, the managers they approached were against the changes because the workers would become lazy. To date embroidery workers are still hunched over their work and quality control assistants are trying to rest their legs by standing on one leg at a time. This exemplifies what middle managers think of their workers; lazy and inefficient. It doesn't exemplify reality.

4. The wages are the only price factors that a factory owner can regulate

In the endless race to the bottom of prices (Reason 1) the buyers have decision power over so much that only the wages are left for the manufacturer to decide. When visiting a large manufacturer recently we asked what the most frustrating part of dealing with buyers was, and the answer was this: buyers sometime have the most ridiculous expectations of quality and embellishment levels combined with price offers that hardly pay for the lining. It's not possible for the manufacturer to cut low on the quality of fabrics as they have to be approved in several procedures - the trims and accessories too.

The only levitation left is investment of new machinery and wages. There are limits to both, but it's easy to see that a broken sewing machine works less than even a hungry worker.

Stay tuned on Twitter for the next 6 reasons of why factories don't pay a living wage...

Let's head to Jaipur

Last weekend I decided it was time Sam and I finally paid a visit to Jaipur. Dubbed the Pink City because the central market used to be painted all pink with paint made from roses. This was a romantic gesture that a Mughal king had done to impress his English wife*. It is much more importantly the centre of handblock printing, but I'm saving that story for later. Here is a collection of some of my pictures from our crazy animal-filled visit to Jaipur.

Space Communication store in the central market. Now the pink is more of an orange shade because the government realised too late that the pink colours was an attraction.

Hello little pidgeon. Saw this through the window as we were walking up the vantage point tower Siralaat.

Sundial with the precision of 2 seconds.

Which zodiac is this? From the Jantar Mantar astrological observatorium.

The Anokhi Museum of handblok printing

  

A wedding horse

The view from Amber Fort to Nahagarh Fort

Inside Amber Fort

Workshop of gold dust printing

Handblock printing factory

The first day we just managed to have a look around the places our excessively charming driver wanted to take us. The second he showed us some factories for whom he used to work as a salesman. He also introduced me to a guru who predicted that I would have troubles with my stomach within two days - thankfully that never happened. So hopefully I will also avoid arthritis and keep my hearing! We ended our last day at the Indian Coffee House. A place where a meal will cost you less than you could ever imagine and where the waiters starch their headdresses in a manner so that they have 20 centimetres of fabric standing straight on the top of their heads.

*Caution: this info is provided by a cheeky untrustworthy tuktuk driver and should have been checked.