Since most of our friends in Mumbai are far more prosperous now than when we fraternised with them a decade ago, they tend to holiday more in Europe than in the Western Ghats

Keya Sarkar: The ugly side of prosperity

Business Standard

I can't remember having felt it in all my years of working in 9-to-5 jobs. But ever since I came to Santiniketan the afternoon nap has become kind of sacrosanct. Probably because the afternoon siesta is not frowned upon here (as by industrious Gujaratis in Mumbai), but in fact, actively encouraged. Many an evening conversation starts with enquiries about the quality of the afternoon nap or, as the Bengalis say, "bhaat ghoom" (rice-induced sleep).I remember when I was first initiated into this art of falling asleep right after lunch, I would bark at those who called mid-afternoon, typically, insurance sales staff or holiday resort pushers. I would reprimand them for calling people in the middle of the afternoon. Conveniently forgetting, of course, the number of people I must have harassed when I had targets to meet. But those were times when I had just left Mumbai and felt the need to stay connected at all times. Now thankfully the Birbhum (the district to which Santiniketan belongs) ma

Keya Sarkar: The sacrosanct afternoon siesta

Now years later, as I live in a house that I inherited from my mother that was built by her father, my life seems to be coming full circle

Keya Sarkar: Down to the basics

As in the rest of the country, winter seems to be late in coming to Santiniketan this year

Keya Sarkar: Sensitivity towards the elderly

The vice-chancellor, who was on the brink of being sacked for financial and other misdemeanour, chose to resign

Keya Sarkar: Losing the essence of Tagore

Many of the people I meet for the first time in Santiniketan tell me how I am doing good to so many people by engaging them in my craft endeavour. I always tell them that the artisans are actually doing me all the good by allowing me to create anything that I wish to and sell and make enough money to support livelihoods of over a hundred now. I work with weavers, dyers, tie dye and batik artists, embroiderers, leather workers, hand block printers, wood and bamboo workers, jewellery makers, ironsmiths, bronze casters…  And I am amazed at how much talent surrounds me.But there are days when I cannot help agree with those who propound the "doing good" theory. Last week, as we were sipping our first cup of tea, Bhuban babu, an elderly man with multiple skills (he helps us paint our house or fashion bamboo screens or sleep over when we are not in Santiniketan) came by to tell me that as he was cycling by, a low-lying branch hit his eye. Although he was hit in the left eye, he couldn't see

Keya Sarkar: Healing touch

So when I got an email from my card issuer asking me to submit my KYC (know your customer) details afresh, I paid heed quickly

Keya Sarkar: The cards we are dealt

I still remember the first day she came to work at the workshop that produces what we sell at my craft and textile shop in Santiniketan. Very young - just 18 - and very shy, Siuli was recommended and brought by another colleague in the embroidery unit. They came from the same village, about seven kilometres from our workshop. This was about three years ago. Siuli's face was so covered with her black synthetic dupatta you could hardly see it.We soon discovered that what Siuli lacked in experience she made up for in skills. Her embroidery was of an exceedingly high order and I say this after 12 years of working with Muslim women, who are all very skilled. I and my colleagues would look at Siuli's work and wonder how her small hands produced what they did.As she spent more time in the workshop, away from her village, Siuli's demeanour changed. Her dupatta, which used to cover her face almost entirely, became more and more an adornment, till it disappeared altogether. Her shiny synthetic c

Keya Sarkar: A little give and take

Like every year, this year too, we fled - from the summer heat of Santiniketan, to return with the monsoons. It is not easy. Every year, our search begins by end-March or early April - the search for a quiet place to shift our home in summer. Not being fond of home stays or resorts and even less of tourists short on trousers and long on conversations on phones, we have been - for the last few years - renting houses and apartments. Now, thanks to many aggregators on the internet, there is plenty of choice. But till you actually arrive at the destination you have seen only in pictures, you don't know whether you have made the right choice.This year, we got exceedingly lucky. We found a little cottage in a village called Digoti, about 12 km from Ranikhet. On a turn-off from the Ranikhet-Almora road, the cottage and the village met more than our expectations. The cottage we rented was part of a small cluster owned primarily by people from Delhi - it seemed more like an investment rather th

Keya Sarkar: Summer sojourn and a great lesson

Many of the artisans had accounts in Gramin banks, which took weeks to credit accounts if cheques deposited were from nationalised or private banks

Keya Sarkar: The problem with bearer cheques

When my mother gifted me the house in Santiniketan, what came along with it, besides some furniture, was a telephone directory produced by a public sector telephone company. Even 12 years ago, when I shifted to Santiniketan, it was pretty useful. Most people still used their landline and despite the fact that the directory was dated, it seemed to throw up the correct contact details more often than not.Over the last decade, of course, the ratio of landline users to mobile users has changed dramatically. And knowing that their customer base was shrinking, the company stopped publishing the directory. As a result, queries about some shops, the availability of particular products have to be made physically.Meanwhile, the number of cars, motorbikes and rickshaws plying on Santiniketan's one and only arterial road has increased exponentially. Bolpur, the town adjacent to the university town of Santiniketan, is where all the shops are and accessing that area has become a nightmare.Having suf

Keya Sarkar: With an eye for detail

In the last few years of my stay in Mumbai, we moved into an apartment that was on Juhu beach, adjacent to Holiday Inn and Sun-n-Sand. It was a beautiful flat with three rooms overlooking the sea and only fitted my budget because as the broker explained: "marble nahin hai na". Thank God for that, because I loved the apartment's old-world mosaic flooring and the gorgeous sunsets that its large windows offered.The only downside was that the apartment was very near to Amitabh Bachchan's residence. So, every Sunday at 5 p m when he came to his verandah to wave to his fans, who routinely collected outside his gate, there would be a traffic jam. Thankfully, the jam was short-lived, with the crowd dispersing when he went back in. We learnt to avoid that time of the week either to make an entry into or an exit from the apartment.And then, the JW Marriott came up in our backyard. While Holiday Inn and Sun-n-Sand were by then past their sheen and, therefore, saw only modest crowds, the brand new

Keya Sarkar: A potato traffic snarl

Poor Tagore. The university he established, Visva-Bharati, where he had envisaged the erudite of the world to meet and debate, artistes and artisans to achieve new heights of aesthetics, musicians and performing artistes to explore and fuse genres, is now a hotbed of petty, parochial interests, with allegations of corruption against the administration.The university seems to be in the news all the time. And almost never for the right reason. In fact, many of my friends and family who call, invariably ask, "What's happening in Santiniketan? What's the latest on Visva-Bharati?" And I have to confess very often that I do not know the latest. Incidents of nepotism in recruitments, allegations of misuse of power, student indiscipline, violence on campus, have become such everyday occurrences that the shock value has waned and is now of little interest.So, I was pleasantly surprised that in the midst of the vice-chancellor being gheraoed at his home, teachers and students boycotting classes

Keya Sarkar: Celebrating Manida's birthday

In the last week of December, Santiniketan holds a large mela. Instituted by Rabindranath Tagore to encourage folk art and culture, it has now become a platform for kitschy handicraft, less music and more loudspeakers. However, it still draws a large number of Bengalis from within and outside India, probably in search of nostalgia. Meandering among the shops in the mela one day, I got a call from my craft shop. One of the salesgirls was calling to check on a credit card transaction.The private sector bank with public sector parentage that I bank with has a Rs 7,500-limit for any transaction on a card issued by a non-Indian bank. Beyond the limit, we are supposed to keep a copy of the cardholder's passport, front side of his card and a signed copy of the invoice. While all this is the stipulation, the bank normally accepts just a copy of the passport as proof of identification.The salesgirl was calling to say that a customer wanted to pay an amount of Rs 17,000 through a foreign card. S

Keya Sarkar: Credit card worries

She was on a brief visit to Santiniketan. Harumi, a textile designer from Kobe, Japan, has been coming to India for over 10 years to work with natural dye printers in Rajasthan. The Hindi that she learnt in Rajasthan made her name her shop in Kobe "Kachua". According to Harumi, it is because her surname, Ikegame, also means kachua. Her love for handmade things had brought her to India and that bond has grown stronger over the years.So last year, when she was passing through Santiniketan, she came to our studio to see our work and told me she would like to come back to combine Rajasthan print with kantha embroidery. I did not take her seriously because so many people had said this before but never showed up.But in August, when she wrote to me asking whether she and a friend could come work with us in November, I was rather excited. I wrote back to her saying yes and also to tell her that, if they wished, both of them could stay with us for a while in Santiniketan. The "lodges" that offe

Keya Sarkar: A square meal - Left or right hand?

One of the not-so-enjoyable things about my current profession, working in textiles and other craft, is my dealings with courier companies. Since I am dependent on a host of my raw material coming from outside by courier and me sending out innumerable parcels to clients in India and abroad, I am in the clutches of these parcel carriers.Each morning, I am either chasing a parcel that has not reached me or following up on one that I sent. The difference between the cheap and expensive courier companies, I have realised in my 10 years of dealing with them, is not in the delivery time taken but the quality of their web interface. Also, after you have sent the consignment, if the net tracking result shows "reached destination hub", "internal misrouting" or "out for delivery", calls to the customer care will still leave you ignorant.A welcome revelation in all of this has been that the speed post is probably currently the best bet - in terms of value, speed and tracking convenience. However,

Keya Sarkar: The part and parcel of post

A few friends from Kolkata were on a two-day trip to Santiniketan just before the start of the pujas. We decided to drive down to the Massanjore dam, built on the Mayurakshi river in the fifties, in two carloads. Although we have done that 50-km route to please many a guest before, we fell in line in order not to make waves.So, picnic hampers with sandwiches, and fruits were packed, because rural West Bengal and Jharkhand, the two states that we would traverse have practically no clean eateries. A few fraudulent dhabas, which serve the Bengali version of daal tadka on dirty plates and even dirtier pink plastic chairs can put you off food for many days.We set off by 10.30 a m, the idea being to stop for lunch by the water before returning home. About 30 km into our journey, our jabbering at the back was interrupted by a sight in front. The car slowed down thanks to a group of tribals blocking the road, playing drums and dancing. Our city friends got excited at the spotting of tribals, a

Keya Sarkar: Puja and tribal rites of passage

As I may have mentioned in this column before, Santiniketan has no municipality. As a university town and now as a vibrant holiday destination for residents of Kolkata, infrastructure in Santiniketan has remained unchanged from what Tagore had planned a hundred years ago.Administrative jurisdiction for this extended university town is divided between the university (for the area that it owns, including large residential areas) and the Ruppur gram panchayat.If the university were to take on conservancy services, it could eat into the money it gets from the Centre for improving teaching facilities and is, therefore, clearly not interested, despite the growing number of students. The Ruppur gram panchayat refuses to recognise the fact that the requirements of a semi-urban area are different from that of a gram. The end result: students and tourists finish their packets of Kurkure and chuck them. Consequently, the university town is starting to look like a dump-yard.Unable to deal with thi

Keya Sarkar: No more 'trash talk' in Santiniketan

Even a decade ago, buying consumer durables in Santiniketan wasn't easy. There were just two shops selling basic models of fridges, TVs, geysers and so on. I remember asking one of them for a four burner gas stove and they looked at me as though I was some master chef. But in line with what the governments have been claiming, rural and semi urban purchasing power has been on the rise and that is showing. Today, we have about half a dozen shops with large shop floors selling the entire gamut."Life's Good" is the slogan for one of the electronic goods manufacturers. And we couldn't have agreed more. We were in the market for a fridge and thought the new shops will ensure we didn't have to compromise on our desires. Having not bought a fridge for at least 20 years, we were curious about what was on offer. We studied the newspaper ads with interest and gaped at the TV ones. The three doors, side-by-sides and ice vendor models whetted our appetite.Armed with the knowledge we went to the fir

Keya Sarkar: 'Do not cling to the fridge door...'

It was 2003. I had shifted to Santiniketan from Mumbai and was restless to use my days in a way that could blend all that I had learnt in my corporate avatar in Mumbai with all that I was gleaning from my new semi-urban existence in Santiniketan.The opportunity arrived when a few of us in Santiniketan decided that we start a "haat" every Saturday afternoon to sell crafts and vegetables. We felt that there were many artists and artisans who were being pushed by middlemen to produce what they thought was "saleable" and the artistic merit of what was being created was taking a nosedive.Instead, we thought, if we created a space where the producers could sit with whatever they wanted to create, customers could get a chance to see what they do not see in the usual craft shops dotting Santiniketan.We started in November with four simple rules: no use of plastic, either in products or packaging; no lighting of fires for food preparation, because we were sitting on forest land; no middlemen, o

Keya Sarkar: The "haat" mania

I have never understood why tourism in Santiniketan has not gone beyond hotels/lodges and a few basic food places. I thought that with the Tagore museum and the university, the brand recall that Rabindranath Tagore and Santiniketan still have globally, the place would be crawling with guides who would take tourists around and share Santiniketan's short but chequered history with them. Also, with increasing interest in indigenous craft, Santiniketan has much to flaunt. With weaving, batik, leather craft, embroidery thriving in and around the area, tourists could have much to savour.But sadly, the university is now thinking of only upgrading the skills of some tout-like guides who hang around the museum and introducing an electric cart to take the elderly around the campus.So recently, when a Thai ex-student of the arts department at the Visva Bharati University said she was bringing a group of Thai tourists to Santiniketan and asked whether I could arrange a kantha embroidery workshop f

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