4.30.07

In a week I am off on a short buying trip to Kerala, the rainforest of South West India.  It’s a beautiful place, and whenever someone asks me about India, it is always at the top of the list.  First off, its beautiful.  It’s a warm, humid tropical place tucked down on the lower part of India.  The place I go is Cochin – specifically the island area of Trevandrum where the Portuguese first came for the spices.  It was, incidentally, this part of India that good old Christopher Columbus set out to find a shorter route to when he “discovered” America (that’s in quotes for any number of historical reasons).  Trevandrum is a beautiful group of islands nestled against the coast.  The people are very laid back compare to the rest of India, the food is different, the language is different, the local government is continually changing – they have the highest literacy rate in all of India here.  Picture an old colonial hotel sitting on the water, eating a perfectly cooked Indian meal of grilled chili sear fish, chapattis, spicy mango pickle and a cool side of yogurt and chickpea called chaat, a gin and tonic (medicinal purposes only), ancient dugout canoes with two fisherman slowly making their way buy, wood ferries held together by rope and tin riding one foot out of the water loaded with people off to work, barges, international container ships occasionally making their way through the channel and the occasional pod of dolphins making their way around the islands.  Warm breeze, fresh mangoes (its May – the peak of mango season) . . . .you know the next line . . . it’s a tough job but, blaa blaa blaa.

This part of India is not a furniture and accessory production area like the north.  What you get here are unusual artifacts and objects that are very specific to this part of India – some pieces have more in common with Africa than India.  The bronze cooking bowls called urulies (ooh-ru-lee) come from here, the great festival bronze ankle bracelets, the granite market weights for weighing produce, vegetable dyed beds, great architectural pieces – they are all from here.  The hard part is, there is not a lot of stuff, so the trips are now down to once a year.  In order for it to be a profitable trip, I need to fill a container, so it takes a year of collecting on my contact’s part to do so.  But every time it’s worth it.  I have tried for a number of years to start up some very small (like 10 person small) cottage industry using green material (not the color, but the type of materials used in production being responsibly collected).  I’ve tried to produce small furniture things: side tables, stools etc, using reclaimed wood from buildings, or harvested rubber tree wood from rubber tree plantations, but its quite hard to get these things done consistently, the way you designed them and on time, so I have had to give up on that – although as I am saying that, this trip I will be giving it another shot at making some things, but they will be very much small batch productions.  Really what happens here is you go through the market place and then to the outlying areas where many of the merchants have their warehouses (called “go-downs”), and you pick through everything piece by piece, haggle though everything piece by piece, and then give cleaning/restoration instructions piece by piece.  Is certainly a lot of running around and there are points where I start to question the logic of spending an hour haggling over something that I will sell for $200, then another hour over the same object giving instructions on what to do – or more importantly what not to do to it.  If I cost averaged my time, I would need to sell the thing for a lot more than $200, but fortunately as an art historian, I don’t let such considerations bother me.  It’s too much fun to get hung up on those things.  When you are wandering around in a place where you can smell the ginger that’s being dried - spread out all over someone’s courtyard in the spice market three blocks away, when you have what looks like a 200 year old man walking the streets selling the most perfectly brewed cup of chai you will ever have, waking up in your beautiful botique hotel to strong Kerala coffee, masala eggs and fresh mango and papaya with a little lime squeezed on top, cost averaging your time in all reality always comes out in your favor.  

Anyway, I will do my best to keep up with the blog entries on the trip for those of you that find following such things interesting.  For the rest of you, the next few entries will in essence be no more than a travel log.  As my mom just told me the other day after reading my entry on our South Africa trip (in which she appears frequently, so you would think she would like it) - and I suggest reading this quote in an Irish accent for full mom effect  - “you’re a bit long winded.”