I spent the weekend at Tirupur to attend a friend’s wedding. Tirupur, incidentally is an interesting place. Any city that calls itself “Banian City” has got to be interesting. For instance, if one watched Hollywood movies frequently , one would easily come to the conclusion that all laptops in the world are made by Apple (and occasionally by Sony). But little did I realize that this ingenious company from the Bay Area would influence one of Tirupur’s successful garment houses, Ramraj Dhoties. Take a look at this
I get down in Tirupur at the bus-stand to be greeted by a dhoti ad featuring an Apple Powerbook! Of course, India is a country where (nowadays) fishermen from Kerala use community based text messaging to figure out the best prices for their catch, while just a few years ago, they were living in grinding poverty. For the mindboggling diversity and the overwhelming religiousness of the subcontinent, technology penetration has happened faster than I can text message “cu 2morO” on my mobile phone.
That said, Tirupur is very enterprising. Chevy Optras jostle for space with bullock carts. There is a lot of wealth being created by the thousands of spinning mills that produce every popular brand name one can think of – Classic Polo, Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger. I even managed to buy a few shirts at about 300 rupees a piece while the tags read “12 euros”. You poor European suckers 🙂
Oh. I forgot to mention my bus journey to Tirupur in the first place. It was a yellow coloured bus. This one.
The driver of the bus, on the other hand, believed that his bus looked more like this:
To cut a long story short, it was raining cats, dogs, marsupials and arachnids. But the TNSETC Enterprise (shown above) was hurtling along at Mach 3 (approximately). And did mention that the windshield wiper was not working? Yes, the driver adopted a “I can’t see a thing anyway, so why bother wasting time driving slowly” strategy. The horn was used more frequently than the brake.
Ah well..all in all, very interesting. What else can have a pointlessly diverse tag cloud like this below
Technorati Tags: banian, tirupur, enterprise, apple, dhoties
Doing Jalsa & Showing Jilpa 
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