Everyone was impressed that I was off on this adventure to make shoes in India for a month, on my own, with only my Business Agents as connections to the entire continent. I kept saying that I "knew I was insane," so I guess everyone thought that I had some idea of what I was in for, but I really didn't. And I knew I didn't, I just knew that I could handle it at this moment in my life, and anyway, I'd been pursuing a way to make my shoes in India for ages, and now that I'd uncovered the opportunity, I felt I had no choice, especially with Pierre's active support.
A couple of times in the weeks preceeding the trip, I sort of welcomed the possibility of NOT doing it, if the first samples I'd been emailed were absolutely awful or if there was an international incident, or if it turned out that it was going to be astronomically expensive for some unforseen reason, but no such luck! Hotels in Delhi, as it turns out, are NOT inexpensive, they are at about the level of hotels in a provincial US city, like St Louis, not at all on the scale of the rupee, in which everything else is wildly inexpensive, like a subway ticket is something like 9 rupees, which would be under 20 cents. Yes, you can stay near the railway station for $20 a night, but I've never been good at staying at those kinds of places.
I had already made a series of mental adjustments about what I was going to be able to produce here. I could tell that my original idea about producing ornate embroidered jeweled gold-threaded shoes in India, utilizing what was, in my mind, the indigenous aesthetic of the place. I was going to make a kind of indo-european shoe instead of the traditional indian shoes one sees everywhere, or the brittle pointy ladylike ones and gaudy sandals we see as exports, made in synthetics, for Hindus, that Indian women wear with their dressy clothes, jeans, or saris. I was going to utilize the ancient techniques I thought that were still being used in inferior materials but in superior materials for my shoes, converted to my designs. As they say in French, ce n'est pas evident.
Whoops! The aesthetic I was imagining existed in the last century, and while the general penchant for embellishment and color is, and always will be, a huge part of the culture here (no one wears black!!!) its contemporary expression is in plastic and polyester, they don't even use silk thread for embroidery, it's called "silky" thread, and there's lots of "silky" stuff because silk is "too expensive" for the mass market here. I haven't told them that I pay upwards of $70 a yard for Indian machine-embroidered silk in the U.S. What does it cost here? Must get to that fabric store that was closed last time. It makes me think of when I asked a Turkish woman to bring back a great pair of shoes from the market in her hometown for me, and she apologized when she told me that all of the footwear in the market was made in India or China, and nothing special anymore, so sad!
I met today with William Bissell, owner of the fab Fabindia company, with 15 stores across Delhi, employing 15,000 village craftspeople to make their lovely clothing and home furnishings. By our standards they are wonderfully affordable chic-traditional and contemporary twists on the classic indian cotton and silk clathing presented in retail settings with an international tone. He told me that he had started out working with shoemakers many years ago, and that they made traditional all-over embroidered shoes with jewels set in them, but it was at least 20 years ago, it's over now, he apologized.
I spent my whole early life feeling, and actually being, "different," and I find that I don't really enjoy being "different" while travelling, especially in this situation when it marks me as an Anglo to sell stuff to. One of the reasons that I am so happy in France is because it is the only place I have ever been where I don't stand out, I look just like them! I wish I were there now. Or I wish someone were here with me, I use Pierre for motivation while traveling, he'd get me out to the local Mosque or fair or whatever, where I don't want to go alone, too much attention to fend off!
People say that what they love about India is "the people," but in Delhi I generally find people to be rather surly, impatient and mercenary (with everyone, not just foreigners), and daily interactions are quite a struggle outside the hotel, if you are lucky to have nice staff in humble places, as I have been. Outside the big city, in smaller towns (even 1,000,000 is a small town!), people are totally different, and it's quite a relief.
I'm completely open to meeting interesting tourists, but most of them don't seem anything like moi, they are mostly regular people out to see the world, or well heeled travelers out to consume the world, or earthy adventurers. If the truth be told, and I could choose one of these types to be, it would be the latter, but I fear I'm Type 2, but not as insulated since I'm really not that well-heeled, so I'm ultra sensitized, really too high strung for the Third World! So far, I have met some lovely people, an Isreali Old India Hand building a house in Jaisalmer, which he offered to me anytime, a French guy spending 6 months on walkabout for photos of craft-speople in India, and a couple of Quebequoise women on a spiritual quest. One of them had sold everything at 50 to enact her lifelong dream of traveling around the world, but I noticed that she was only going to Asia, that was "the world" to her. So far she had loved everything, except spicy food. She was surprised when I told her to be careful in Thailand, she had no idea the food would be spicy there! But she was on the trip she'd dreamt of all her life and it was working out for her, why quibble?
I do wish you would write down what you felt without being so condescending about it...You visit just Delhi and JOdhpur and think you have seen the 'third world'? And I hope you do realize that the word is supposed to be derogatory now...India has much more to see before you say finis. I wandered into your blog and expected some objective observations of what you disliked in India... but , well....
Posted by: Charulata Iyer | November 30, 2008 at 06:16 PM
Yes, I know it is politically incorrect to say The Third World, and in part that is why I'm saying it. People can visit the US and feel free to hate it for it's consumerism and banality, yet we are not supposed to visit Mexico or India and judge it with the same level of intensity because they are relatively poor countries. I'm a socialist by nature, and wish that we had less and they had more here, but it isn't like that, and I'm just writing my natural reactions. But you are right, there is nothing for you to get from my blog, and you might be surprised to like me if you met me!
Posted by: Qwendy | November 30, 2008 at 07:34 PM