Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
1991 reforms. I met Krishna, a woman in her fifties, whose two sons had successful ca-
reers. One was a manager in a cardboard-box factory in the nearby town of Karnal, while
the younger one, aged 32, was a manager in Delhi at an outlet of the Café Coffee Day chain,
having earlier worked with KFC. His wife lived at the small Beejna family home and was
training to become an air hostess in Karnal, while he earned enough for their five-year-old
twin sons to be bussed 12 km daily to a Karnal school. 'We send the boys there so they can
be educated in a more promising environment than the village,' said Krishna. 'It's where
Kalpana Chawla went,' she added proudly, referring to a local hero and illustrating how
aspirational Indians proudly latch on to accessible icons. (Chawla moved to America in the
1980s, became an American astronaut, and was killed in a NASA shuttle disaster in 2003.)
In a government-funded crèche attached to the village school, Krishna and two friends
proudly produced mobile phones from their blouses and said everyone over the age of 16
had one. One of their husbands had a well-connected job as a court typist in Karnal, where
their daughter studied in college and hoped to get a job in a bank. At the school, children
were being taught under the shade of trees when we arrived. With 400 children of all ages,
it was four times bigger than in the early 1980s. The pupils' horizons had expanded from
the village to Karnal's call centres and shops, and beyond.
Clearly, prospects for the young had been transformed in these 25 years. Not everyone
was successful, of course. I met a durrie weaver in Panipat who had set up his own factory
but found it tough going, and both he and his wife wished he had stayed as a well-paid
skilled employee. But they had consolations that would not have been possible in the 1980s
- one son was running a 'tent house' business providing equipment for parties and the other
one hoped to expand his father's factory one day.
Despite the enormous changes, old traditions remained. Krishna's daughter-in-law
touched our feet as we walked into the house and when we left, but the daughter did not
do so, showing the different status of the two young women in the husband's home. The
daughter in-law covered her head with her shawl as soon as a youngish man walked in, and
removed it when he left.
Durries are now mostly made in factories, not in villages, though an elderly woman
was weaving one with torn scraps of old material in Beejna, showing that the lifestyle of
the very poor had changed little. Durries are also needed less because the charpoys on
which they were used as thin mattresses are being replaced by plastic chairs. Bharat Carpet
Manufacturers, the Panipat company that handled Darshan's durrie, has spun off another
company, V-Weave, and has grown into a leading supplier to top American stores such as
WestElm and Crate&Barrel. Madhukar Khera, who ran the firm in the 1980s, and his son
Nikhil who is in charge now, have expanded traditional weaving skills to produce thick
hand-spun wool rugs and other floor coverings. So, although the eventual takeover of Con-
