Bhuj Bound

Microsites for bandhani (tie-dye), pottery, Ajrakh (block printing), and ply split weaving are now live at: exhibitions-khamir.org. Through these sites, Khamir’s unique research archive on the craft communities of Kutch is available to people around the world for the first time.

Though Khamir often hosts visiting students, artists, and tourists interested in handicrafts, I began to wonder whether there weren’t some missed opportunities to attract and engage visitors who arrive on campus

How can smaller nonprofits take advantage of the internet and the prevalence of mobile phones not only to spread their message, but to actually improve their programs?  I came to India this year to see how I could apply my knowledge of nonprofit branding, and UX design to an organization that is far more grassroots, and far less funded, than some of the large NGOs that were my clients in New York.

I’ve always been fascinated by human beings’ predilection for adding ornamentation to our surroundings. What is the impetus for going to the trouble of decorating everything? A love of color, pattern, and decoration is obvious across India, and in Kachchh, where handicrafts have played an important role in culture and livelihoods for millennia, it’s especially hard to miss. 

I’m sitting next to Ranabhai, a leather artisan who has been making traditional Kachchhi shoes for many decades in the village of Hodka, Gujarat.  Ranabhai uses the same rohi (flat stone work surface) as his great-great-grandfather. Yet he’s lived through quite a few changes to his craft. 

“It’s always refreshing to go to the field,” one of my new colleagues at Khamir remarked to me recently. We’ve been visiting “the field” all week, interviewing leather artisans all over the region of Kutch. Clusters of artisans live in tiny villages in the middle of the desert, making intricate handicrafts with leather and embroidery.

Parmigiano reggiano is really hard to make! The cows are milked twice a day, milk brought into vats, cheese curds are strained into linen cheesecloths, drip-dried, their linen “diapers” changed twice a day, bathed in salt water, heated in a sauna, and brought into a warehouse of thousands of cheeses where they are aged for years. This is all carefully regulated by a consortium, lest anyone be cheated out of the true, artisanal cheese experience.

Our first Airbnb hosts in Bologna were from Ferrara. They left us some traditional Ferraran bread, little twists in the shape of a butterfly. It wasn’t an auspicious introduction - they were dry and tasteless like ashes in our mouths (as were most Italian bread we’ve come across).  But Ted, his mom Daniella and I decided to make a day trip to Ferrara to see if the town had anything else to offer.

I had been grumpy about being the first pickup in my 8 person tour of the Amalfi Coast, but when I realized it gave me the front seat next to the driver, I realized it was worth it.  With blind turns, a drop to the sea on one side, and cliffs on the other, I was glad that I wasn’t the one driving. The other drivers weren't very reassuring either: my driver kept shouting, "They have a the brain of the mouse!"

Any sightseeing fatigue I may have had when we arrived in Bologna was short-lived. The high speed Italian trains really are fast.  Going 200 mph, I arrived in Napoli just a few hours after leaving Bologna in the early morning.  I’d arranged for a car to take me to the sights, and so I was driven around by Pino, a philosophy major who works for his wife.

Ted, his parents and I stayed in the Italian Alps for a week in a tiny town called Cassana.  The entire area felt like a summer camp for Italians, full of playgrounds and apple orchards and ski stuff. The roads were terrifying narrow, cliff-edged nightmares, but the weather was refreshingly cool and the dairy products were top-notch

Ted and I were excited to have a week to ourselves in and around Rome to catch up on some sleep and get some work done (in Ted’s case) after our weeks of wandering.  August, as we might have expected, isn’t the best time to visit - it’s packed with tourists and baking hot. Nevertheless, we found ourselves a lovely Airbnb on a quiet twisty street in Trastevere.  Across the street was a public drinking fountain that burbled like a waterfall all night