Just joined Living Raaga - By Savita Thakur

I always wanted to help people and give back to society.  I came across article of Living Raaga which Vinutha was running. I got inspired and wanted to participate but because of family and work I couldn’t make it. Vinutha mentioned that they need helping hand in selling their products.  That really clicked a thought in me; I knew I would like to do that. I took a huge lot of products and I started to show products to my friends and apartment folks.  They were encouraging and did buy quite a bit of materials.

My friends too gave ideas to improve on products, and with those ideas we launched new high end kundan rangolis !!!

 Most of the products came from Nava Jeevana (APD); there has been an impressive sale within a month.   I am trying to use my friend’s network to increase our sales. My 9 year son is very enthusiastic about this and he keeps giving idea for attracting more people.

I am very happy that my dream came true finally!!!!

New Kundan Rangoli design

Rachina Doddi - Revisited

By Divya

We visited Rachiana Doddi in Sept 2010 (blog article), after that we were unable to go to the village for a long time. We finally revisited the village on 27 July 2011. This time we had done lot thinking on what kind of products to teach and markets for them. Soroptimists International volunteered to take up marketing for the products.

In spite of the long gap, when Matilda and I went to the village, the ladies in the village were very enthusiastic about the session. We had brought material for side-hangings and we wanted the village women to gain expertise in it. There were about 15 women and we started our session in the village school. All the kids gathered around us out of curiosity seeing all the glittering material.

Communication was a problem for me but sign language and translation put me in a comfort zone. I started from making the flowers for the hangings and inspected everyone's flowers so that they could understand the importance of perfection. I made them redo many times till they made flowers with closed petals. Next I had samples of the rejected lot from our last visit, I told them about the mistakes they had made. Slowly they picked up and everyone started making their side hangings. The kids too made flowers. By around 11:30 a.m. we were done and we gave them material and instructions for the new order.

It was a fruitful session which the village women and we thoroughly enjoyed. Hope they are doing practicing well. Matilda hopes to find a market in U.K. for the handicraft when she goes for a conference later this year.