Consumers: Take ownership of what you own

This corner of my room spells happiness for me. It has a floor mattress that I had made from a young man who runs a tyre-repair shop and a stuffs mattresses and pillows in the same roadside shack. The floor mattress is in a patchwork cover that I sewed myself with scraps of beautiful block-printed cloth given to me by a wonderful business enterprise here. The three cushions have all been painted and sewn by me, using some new and some old material. The new material is a beautiful khaadi cloth hand-woven by people locally. The old material is a discarded pair of jeans and some more scrap block-printed cloth. In the background, I get a warm glow from a paper lamp that I painted. There is a beautifully-framed painting that is very personal to me.

I am a strong supporter of the idea of consumers taking ownership of what they own and possess. The ease with which things are available in physical stores and their online counterparts and the number of things that is available, is mind-numbing. But here is the thing: as a consumer, the quicker and easier you get something for your own, the less you value it and the less it means to you. The idea of putting thought and time into something adds infinite value to it that also lasts longer.

We have accepted absurd notions such as 'consumer is king' or advertising is able to woo us about things we may or may not need or retail therapy or shopaholics. Quantity and consumerism is not the answer to anything and is ABSOLUTELY a farce. Here are a few counter thoughts to these notions:

1. The things you own and the things you consume are a reflection of you

If you are another piece in the crowd, if you sport hair the way everybody 'in fashion' does, if you buy clothes of the latest cut, design, fabric and colour, then you are not paying any attention to your individuality. You are just following a crowd and being just like a lot of other people are. Therefore, it is pointless to buy something because it is available and because it is desired by many. That does not define you. The diversity that will come in your life and the happiness that will accompany a true revelation and a conscious celebration of who you are, through the things you own, will be a very satisfying way to live.

2. Perfection in imperfect hands

I strongly advocate making as many things as you need. If it is a loaf of bread, bake it. If it is an addition to your wardrobe, sew or knit it. If it is a piece of furniture, well build that too! The feeling of creating something is so absolutely fulfilling that you would want to do it all the time. When you make something, you give yourself the opportunity to grow as a person and to improve yourself. Most importantly, you learn about yourself. The things you make will have their flaws. And that, to me, is what makes them so perfect!

3. How was it made?

Of course, a lot of times, you will not be able to make something you want. So when you choose to buy something, do so responsibly. Going to the nearest retail store and purchasing what you need is NOT responsible. Yes it is glossy and excellently displayed, yes it is advertised like crazy till you feel your life is empty without it. But that is just the farce of it. There are important questions to ask, before anything is purchased. Who made it? In what conditions? Why is it priced such? Is the money going into the hands of the greedy corporate figures at the top, or is the money fairly distributed among all members in the production process. What material was used? How has that damaged the environment? To read it here, these may seem questions too big to deal with. After all, all you came to do was spend some money and get some things. But this habit is not really cumbersome and once you adopt it, you will be able to value things so much more. We should all demand of retail companies to advertise how products are made and who all benefit from the process of production and profits when the products are sold.

4. Promote local

We need this desperately. I urge everybody to promote local. Ditch the retail stores, ditch the malls, ditch the brands. Copy their designs and pay local businesses to make the same. Whether it is furniture or clothes or bags, find people around. One of the things that I want to do at some point is compile a directory of local craftspeople and businesses for different neighbourhoods and areas of Dehradun. The directory will include tailors and seamstresses, women and men who knit, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, cooks and other artisans and skilled workers who people can contact for getting stuff made.

So the idea that I am strongly advocating for, is to think about what you need and why, to enjoy the process of procuring it and to find satisfaction in what you own and how it shaped you as a person.

Our new Minimum Wage pricing policy

The concept of pricing products is an alien one for me and my partner, Soko though she will die before she will admit it. "We are Punjabis, business comes naturally to us", she fervently insists everytime I begin a conversation about how we should really consider outside help with pricing and selling. But believe me on behalf of both of us, we are truly bad.


But we make good art. And in the latest addition to products we paint are jute bags. In Mumbai recently, Soko and I went to the Chembur market and found a vendor selling these pretty jute bags of pure white. I fell in love with them instantly and I swear to God I do not joke when I say that they were screaming out to me to paint on them. It is true.

So I picked up one and began painting on it. Now finished, the bag has a couple of paintings from a Facebook group called "A Girl's Guide to Taking Over the World" that deals with women's rights. As as Dumbledore had said, "In my not-so-humble opinion", the bag looks absolutely fantastic!

Now again came forth the question of pricing it. Our staunch principle has always been to keep our products very affordable. We don't want to be as low-end as we possibly can. So during the days that we were discussing the pricing bit, one of the things that I kept stumbling upon- whether in the newspapers or in discussions among people that I have an unforgivable habit of listening into- was minimum wages.

The thing that I have observed about minimum wages is that people seem to think this established mark on money to be paid for a job is "good enough" for the worker. When that is not the case. Not at least to me. This is the MINIMUM amount and the money we pay to our skilled or unskilled and all other categories of workers must always be more than minimum if we can help it. Sadly, that is not the case.

Then there was obviously the recent controversy over the poverty line definition by the Planning Commission that is also obviously concerned with wages. Here, I saw a poster somebody had shared on Facebook that said politicians should be put on minimum wages so that they understand the issues they formulate policies on, better. And that did make sense. How many us really know about minimum wages? I know I don't. Not as much as I should know, at least. And the irony is that while we will haggle endlessly with our sabzi-wala or the rickshaw-puller for 5 rupees, we will not even dream of haggling at the fancy brand-stores that sell things with shamelessly-high profit margins.

So I decided we will work on minimum wages too. I check the Uttarakhand minimum wages chart (available here) and found "printing of cloth" as the nearest job to what I do. So the semi-skilled worker that I am will get Rs. 167 per day. Now I took two days to paint the bag but more intricate work may take 2.5 days, though never more than that.

Ergo, depending on the number of days taken to paint the bag, the labour charges for the work will be:

167X2= 334 or 167X2.5= 418

Add the price of the bag (about rupees 80) and you will get your final price of the bag. We will also include some information about Minimum Wages and other uncomfortable stuff in one panel of the bag, besides the things that you want on it.

Here's to living without money! :)

Can you and I collide?

I have for a while now not been painting new posters and designs. It is great fun and a very satisfying experience but it is not adding to the larger picture and I have begun to realize that there is better use that the little creativity I have, can be put to.

It is funny how the affluent have evolved so admirably into people who can choose to not look at something. Sometimes we not look at things and people our whole lives. Garbage collectors are one of the invisible groups of people in our society. I have been reading this incredible book "We are poor but so many" by SEWA Founder Ela R. Bhatt and what astonishes me is not the things that she has revealed about the poor and downtrodden folks but the fact that I know about all of this. I have known about all of this maybe in a subconscious dimension of the brain and yet it did not surface until very recently. That is how good we are at choosing to not see what is very apparent and right there before us. It is truly disturbing.

I believe that the group of people that need most help is us, the affluent or the "middle class" or any one of the numerous tags attached to people with some assets, some financial security and therefore have some social standing too. Nobody is more limited in perspective and horizons than we are.

Those lucky few who have had the opportunity to take of the tinted glasses and see the reality soon realize that it is people who are first exploited and then blamed for their situation are actually the brilliant ones. They survive and thrive in circumstances that are beyond the earlier-mentioned limited vision and perspective of people enslaved by material comforts.

This is not rant. At least I am not throwing things around as I type.

Now the one thing that I have noticed is that all efforts towards providing opportunities to the impoverished do not involve an element that seems important to me- recognition of the downtrodden as people and above that, as people with dignity. The middle-class man only sees social workers or social entrepreneurs as people creating trouble by meddling with established structures and systems. Sometimes, we are the instigators of "strange ideas" in the "heads of people who deserve to be where they are". While I was working with the NGO that provided education to street children, I found that people were more comfortable with the idea of a foreign volunteer interacting with the street kids (firangis are apparently strange people who do things like that) than my sitting with them.

Similarly, I have read about some efforts to sensitize affluent people towards the realities of the exploited and yet I feel it is restricted, in that it does not bring about a collision of the two groups. I don't mean collision in the sense of war but in the sense of two forces coming together. What I am trying to put forth (and doing a really bad job at it, I think) is why should our efforts towards an equitable society be so divided into water-tight compartments? Efforts for poor and efforts for the to-be-sensitized affluent.

I realize that this will sound incredibly naive but I am wondering should there not be more work towards making sure that our invisible groups are actually seen and heard by those so adept at looking right through them?

I am working on the plan of a social enterprise on waste management and recycling, and has the added element of a subscription-based service that provides shopping bags of cloth and jute to shoppers outside main markets of Dehradun so that the use of polythene can be effectively banned.

A hundred different targets with the same arrow, I sometimes feel but you won't know unless you try, eh?

Now one of the things that I want to really work at is having the groups of affluent and impoverished folks interact more. Here is an idea: instead of the consumer being the king and blah blah blah, how about developing a service/enterprise that is so sought-after either in terms of brand-value or the use of the service itself that people are bound to accept the conditions we attach with it?

As a very petty example indeed, I recall watching a program on the Discovery TLC channel where this very highly-rated chef served some of his renowned delicacies but had a list of Do's and Dont's that he had put on every table and the customers were required to follow these or they could just as well leave. For example, you could not ask for more salt! Yah!

Now when I do set up this business, the one rule I know I will absolutely-religiously follow is that you CANNOT be rude to any member of my business enterprise. The same rule of course applies to the employees but also really strictly to the customer. 'We do not accept rude customers'is what our advertisements and billboards will read!

Whether these thoughts are naive and only good enough to be battered with a bludgeon, is something we will learn in time. Until then, we are free to envision!

Inspired from Reuse Connection!

For the last two years now, I have been subscribed to and therefore been reading about wonderful art from recycled material that is showcased on the page Reuse Connection. It is incredibly inspiring and has had me, since many months collecting cardboard boxes, paper scraps, gift-wrapping paper and most importantly, my used insulin vials. I proudly share that I have a whole box full of those pretty glass vials that I cannot wait to work on.

So, the first project that I began work on was making a lamp shade out of a KFC bucket.



Eventually, however I scrapped the idea of the lamp shade because it needed a few fixtures that I was just in no mood of spending time and money on. Instead, I got really cheap beads from the market and the erstwhile lamp-shade now hangs prettily in my room like this:



Yesterday, I shared this picture on A Little Part of Me's Facebook page and was very happy to see the positive feedback. Encouraged by the 'Likes', I am now sharing another "reuse" project.

Kamla Nagar market in New Delhi's famous north campus has these road-side vendors who sell really cool and inexpensive badges. Beatles, I love Tibet, Love, Che Guevara- you name it, they have it. I had bought a few of these the last time I was in Kamla Nagar market and had been wondering what to do with them.

A really nice idea is to pin these badges on all sides of a cardboard box. There can, obviously be any number of creative ways to do it. I used old wrapping paper and covered the box in different styles and colours of the paper on all sides. Then I added golden beads to the string from which the box hangs and finally attached the badges on various sides. I have been unable to post pictures here for some reason after the one above, so I am sharing the link to our Facebook page, where I have uploaded these pictures:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.282792081779815.69880.220154094710281&type=1

Peace Tree #Calendars 2012

I have been toying with a gazillion ideas for the calendar but seeing as the time is short, I am focusing on one theme only for 2012 calendars. Around this time last year, I had written something down while painting a calendar for my room.

It went like this (I have edited it one year forward for 2012):

"The world, as we knew it ended with 2011.


This year,

There will be more trees
There will be more peace
There will be honest sweat glistening off fields and offices,
There will be unlearning of redundancy and blind dogma
And then some new learning of life and living.

The world will not end in 2012.
But it will be reborn."


I am still not sure if I will create a design that incorporates the entire text because honestly, sometimes it feels uninspiring and something that you just say without really meaning it. But while I was sketching for the first two lines, I had made, what I call "Peace Tree" that looks like this:



So while I continue to mull over the original idea (that I had named 2012- "This Year"), I am painting a Peace Tree Calendar 2012. Also, I don't like the fact that calendars have a short life and at the end of the year that they are designed for, they are discarded.

So I have plan to have a perforated break between the dates and the painting like this:



The idea is that at the end of the year, the painting bit can be separated from the rest of the calendar, framed (or not) and put up somewhere, like other posters and paintings.

Figuring things out

The past few months, while I have been happily painting away and logging in to our Facebook page to beam while I see the 'Likes' and read the comments, I have simultaneously been figuring out how I want to shape this little venture. Your business managers will be appalled by this confession- a business start-up WITHOUT ANY PRE-PLANNING?
:/

So here is what I have figured out until now. I am basing this venture on two premises:

One, buyers do not know best anymore (sorry, but there is too much one-sided media advertising and consumerist-hype that does not give us people the fair space to explore and decide what we want).

Two, it is not business, it is personal. So if I over-price my products, it reflects on the person that I am. In this case, a greedy b****. And I will not let that happen.

I also have to share why I chose the name "A Little Part of Me". The "me" in our business name is not meant to denote the artist. Instead, it is meant to convey that through this business- through posters, lamp shades, wall hangings, craft projects, stones and everything else that comes in my way- we celebrate the non-consumerist, non-market side of everybody who chooses to be part of it. It is about creating something for the love of creativity. For the love of imagination. And for the love of personal choices and likes/dislikes. So whether that part of me is a bathroom singer or that part is the inexplicable love for the Twilight series, this business will celebrate it (the latter, with gritted teeth, sure but it will celebrate it).

The 'Me' also signifies individuality and exclusivity. I strongly believe that one should not have to pay large sums of money to be able to get exclusive things.

In the last few months since we have started out, I have learnt several times that greed is a powerful tempter. When somebody comes up to me and says "hell, I would pay 100 rupees for this; you are crazy to sell it at 40 rupees", out come the greedy serpents and coil around my brain and whisper/hiss things like "why not? you could finally afford to move to a place of your own." But it is my frustration with over-priced products that made me start this venture. So I will keep prices low and celebrate non-branding like nothing else never has.

But in order to keep prices low, I will not resort to having little children work for me at dismal wages, nor will I compromise with quality of the product. This exercise is actually the most challenging of all. Can entrepreneurs choose to cut down on their own expenses, their wants and their lifestyle in a way that will empower them to survive in the limited profits that their business generates? I am working on this same principal.

So I have decided to make everything that I want. I have resorted to using public transport for long-distance commuting and for shorter-distances, using my bicycle or walking. I have given up buying goods from branded stores. For example I source my cloth from Khadi and will soon try to stitch my own kurtas and shirts. I fancied a stole that I saw in a bling-bling store recently and I am now knitting it because I'd be damned before I pay rupees 1200 for it (their MRP after generous discount!) I have given up drinking diet coke or eating at restaurants. If I want a burger, I will get my own meat, mince it and cook it myself.

There is, of course still to much consumerism in the way I live and I still a long way to go before I can shed the effects of media and advertising from my life, but this little start makes me feel incredibly empowered.

Because, and I will say this again- it is not Business, it is Personal.

Japanese art fever!

I have been gripped with an intense and possible irrevocable love for Japanese Art. I love the simplicity that at the same time is paradoxically very detailed. I like how the paintings do not focus on creating dimensional figures and forms but are still very intricate in defining and almost celebrating the forms they create- whether clouds, trees or kimonos on women. The background is the most interesting bit, usually in earthly colours and with beautiful textures.

Here are a few examples of the work I have been staring, lovingly at. I must mention here that the paintings have been taken from Google and the links provided thereunder will take you to the original website, where you may find the artist and other information.



http://media.photobucket.com/image/japanese+art+winter+/verushka666_album/Japanese%20Art/060b.jpg



http://www.erikthomsen.com/publications/latest



http://fineartamerica.com/featured/japanese-landscape-kirill-danileiko.html


https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Luneko-Koitsu-Tsuchiya-Miyajima-in-Snow/285588

I have been spending hours Googling and then staring at Japanese landscape paintings and I want to now paint landscapes of Dehradun in that form. The new year is just round the corner and I want to create four paintings of the landscape in Dehradun during these four seasons and make 2012 calendars from these paintings.

As a start, however, I am going to paint from two photographs that I took at a lovely restaurant that I visited yesterday with some friends. Up in Rajpur in Dehradun, there is a restaurant called Orchard. It is a Tibetan/Chinese restaurant and has the most beautiful outdoor dining setting with bamboo clumps and a stunning view of the surrounding mountains.

Here are the pictures: