"It is like a mask. Behind the facade, he was known for his erudition and penchant for literature, and he devoured the world’s leading newspapers daily.Sporting dark suits, white, pony-tailed hair and tinted sunglasses in his later years that made him instantly recognisable, an irreverent wit was also part of a carefully crafted persona. A refusal to look to the past was one of his biggest assets, those who knew him said. 10, 1933. Lagerfeld, dubbed "Kaiser Karl" and "Fashion Meister" among a whole host of media monikers, was born in Hamburg to a German mother and a Swedish father who imported condensed milk.The big breakthrough came shortly after a move to Paris when, in 1954, he drew a wool coat that won a prize and landed him an apprenticeship with designer Pierre Balmain.Though he long enjoyed befuddling interviewers by citing different years of birth, the one deemed the most reliable is Sept. Saint Laurent, who died in 2008, became the enfant cheri of high society and Lagerfeld leader of a wild-child younger group. In rare moments when he was not working, Lagerfeld retired to one of his many homes in Paris, Germany, Italy or Monaco, all of them lavish carbon copies of 18th-century interiors.

The two became fierce competitors and even rivals in love at one point, chasing the affections of late Parisian society figure Jacques de Bascher.An accomplished photographer, he drew his own designs by hand, an increasingly rare phenomenon in fashion. Occasionally his sharp tongue has stirred controversies, though he also had a flair for a good soundbite.Yves Saint Laurent, who went on to found his namesake label, won the dress prize." His artistic instincts, business acumen and commensurate ego combined to commercially triumphant effect in the rarefied world of high fashion, where he was revered and feared in similar proportions by competitors and top-models..Known to adore Diet Coke, Lagerfeld said he shed weight in the early 2000s to fit into the razor-thin suits brought in by Christian Dior’s then menswear designer Hedi Slimane. In the past year these have featured a full-scale beach and an enormous replica ship. Yet Lagerfeld also stood out as a craftsman. And for me the Carnival of Venice lasts all year long.His cat Choupette moved with the times too: the white-haired Birman, described by her social network minders as "daughter of Karl Otto Lagerfeld", has more than 100,000 Instagram photo-network followers and a publishing deal.

The designer mingled with the young and trendy until the last, pairing up with 17-year-old catwalk darling Kaia Gerber, cotton ribbon wholesale daughter of Cindy Crawford, for a collaboration released by his Karl Lagerfeld brand in 2018.Lagerfeld was as harsh with his fashion models as he was searingly critical of anyone he considered "not trendy".But it was Chanel that propelled him to rock-star status, as he sexed up the brand and lifted its profile with grandiose runway shows. He spent early childhood tucked away from war in the 1,200-acre family estate in Bavaria and had a French tutor."I am like a caricature of myself, and I like that," runs one legendary quote attributed to him, and often recycled to convey the person he liked to play.But Lagerfeld, who simultaneously churned out collections for LVMH’s Fendi and his eponymous label, an unheard of feat in fashion, was almost a brand in his own right.Paris: Karl Lagerfeld enjoyed the stature of a god among mortals in the world of fashion, where he stayed on top for well over half of a century and up to his death, at an age almost nobody apart from himself knew with to-the-day precision.

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Not for a minute is one suggesting that children shouldn’t go to school or acquire literacy skills, if not proper education.India’s nearly 49 million craftspersons and weavers live in easily identifiable pockets. In the bargain they pick up the skill and in many cases, take the art a step further. This was the same mindset that created the schism between art and crafts, relegating craft to second grade activity and alienating it by pushing it in the category of mere skill as opposed to high art.The half baked literacy thus acquired often pushed them into the lull of wanting to give up their skills in order to chase the chimera of becoming a ‘bada admi’ – read white collar worker. The slogan that every child must go to school and this one-size-fits-all kind of education is neither relevant to lives nor to the skills they had acquired since childhood.By attaching gory labels like child labour, the children are being alienated from their traditional skills, many of which can only be learnt in childhood when the fingers and hands are nimble and supple.

In such a scenario, it worked fine till the speed of change was not almost instantaneous but now when traditional mores are headed West-wards at a dizzy speed, it is time to wake up and not forget and lose everything. Just to share a few examples: A Madhubani painting on Lord Shiva, shows a Ganga emanating from his hair, polluted as it reaches the earth, another depicts a film strip with two women puffing at cigarettes, yet another shows hand pumps and buckets as opposed to wells and pitchers. It would be so easy to set up schools that could target the popular arts of the region, get the best skilled craftspersons to devote some time to teach the intricacies to the next generation. I vividly recall a wooden masala daan with a carved cover that held my Naani’s magical spices and so many large sized copper and bronze utensils used for storing water. The children could learn skills and education of relevance and these could work like centers of non-formal education, provided the seniors of the community are involved polyester taffeta ribbon Factory and made aware of their role as stakeholders in the situation.Years ago on a magazine assignment on handmade paper from Sanganer (yes they did paper as well as hand block printing on textile) I, a cub reporter, was amazed at the conviction with which O P Jain, the founder of the Sanskriti Museum went about collecting beautiful things of everyday use from the old shops in the area as photographer Avinash Pasricha and I wandered around.In the realm of traditional and folk painting, the seamless way in which happenings, modern lifestyles, et al are depicted speak of minds that are evolved and sensitive. Molela terracotta sculptures with airplanes and electric trains cheek by jowl with traditional icons, and icons with mobile phones in one of the hands!On the same hand are designs perfected over centuries by weavers used in traditional sarees being used as motifs for non-natural fabrics.

The fact is that he was right and I was not.  It is time to salvage whatever we can from a civilization that considers every aspect of life and for that matter even life as a matter of constant transition, rather like a flowing river. I managed to retrieve her red sandstone pathrota that she used for sunning pickles and use it as a birdbath.  Dr Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist and can be contacted at alkaraghuvanshi@yahoo. Which just goes to show that the design was perfected and had withstood the test of time and we were just responding to the fabric, or was it that the eye was used to seeing the design and happy to go with it? The naturalness of this depiction is very far from the self-conscious approach of the urban elite of seeing the folk and traditional as "them" and the other as "us". So many objects of great aesthetic beauty have vanished from our lives just because we took them for granted. Kanch-ipuram sarees being a case in point: The same designs of the borders and korvai worn by our grandmothers being used for lightweight silks from Aarni or even synthetic fabrics.

These myopic steps will result finishing an entire generation of craftsperson, who will per force take up alternative professions and be pushed several steps below in the economic ladder. But surely that education could be of relevance to their lives and help them lead a better and more composite life that helps them overcome exploitation of any kind? Or bifurcation of those who wanted to stay into higher education and those who were better suited to taking up their filial professions.One of my pet peeves is slapping on the label of child labour on to children of crafts persons and handloom weavers as they learn the various crafts within their homes — working with and helping their parents with some of the steps of creating the crafts. Just because the artisan has the skill to virtually create a clone of his or her own work by sheer years of practice, does it mean there is no thought behind it? Or is it not contemporary? One has to look at some of the forms and it hits like a surprise that average craftsperson is so aware of the change that is constant around them and how they are able to create ways to both acknowledge the change and incorporate it in their work. Obviously the marginal skill those schools taught them was not enough to turn this dream into reality and yet the aspiration was too deeply ingrained in their psyche. And what it did was to make them misfits in both the situations.One of my pet peeves is slapping on the label of child labour on to children of crafts persons and handloom weavers as they learn the various crafts within their homes — working with and helping their parents with some of the steps of creating the crafts.    All these lovingly created individual pieces were replaced by things of industrial design and mass produced.com. And we will spill tears for yet another craft system that will forever be hurled into oblivion. But these are almost wistful snatches of an era gone by that many of us lived in. And we thought we had progressed.

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Above all, there was that minor matter of Jammu and Kashmir, which could have been only kept in a "secular" state.An honest bargain could have been struck in a Hindustan.For this lot "secularism" is a political burden because it opens the Congress to the charge of being "Muslim-friendly". Indeed even the Prophet’s birthday was celebrated by Mohsin Kakorvi by describing the clouds floating ecstatically from Kashi to Mathura to catch a glimpse of Krishna."Strange, the connections the mind makes. If this is the way the game is to be played, the polity will continue to shift dangerously towards the far right.As the only North Indian (and a Muslim to boot), who edited a newspaper covering all South Indian states with my headquarters in Chennai for a full five years, some credit must attach to what I am saying.If Partition couldn’t have be avoided, the next best option for all would have been Hindustan, the obvious name for the country under Hindu Raj.

The strength for the four Supreme Court judges seeking correctives will come from federal India, the one pulsating outside the cow belt.All of this would have had a chance of surviving had Partition not taken place.Historians say power was what Jawaharlal Nehru sought. After the Congress’ almost enthusiastic rush to accept Pakistan, this would have been the logical outcome.This state is custom-made for audio books, of course, but also terrific to contemplate earthquakes like the ones that have gripped the nation.The convulsions, from my bird’s eye view (which is what an eye under repair provides) is of much greater intensity in the Hindi belt, plus parts of Maharashtra and Gujarat. Once the Congress had accepted the two-nation theory, de facto, Hindu Raj or Hindustan had become inevitable.From my Yoga Nidra location, all of these are fanciful speculations extrapolated mostly from the Hindi belt. Sarmad’s experience came across to me as a variation on the most serene aasana in yoga called Yoga Nidra.Influential segments of the chatterati are beginning to place their bets on the soft saffron of what in common parlance may be described as the New Congress. What if the Rahul Gandhi Congress presidency flops?A pity the Congress residual leadership does not see the dangers of competitive communalism.

In this belt, we Urduwallas had placed all our bets on the durability of the Ganga-Jamuni culture which we had forged over centuries of cultural commerce and an overriding love for this land, its culture, its soft pastoral tones. In this aasana, as the body slips into the deepest sleep, consciousness is proportionately sharpened, to a point where the mind can traverse the details of the body, the immediate environment and the universe outside. Meanwhile, the Congress president is also testing the external affairs ministry by setting up high-powered meetings in Bahrain (earlier this month), in Singapore in March, Kuala Lumpur, London and heaven knows where else, bypassing Indian diplomatic missions, particularly the ones not inclined to be helpful. Such a label would have smacked of the "mofussil" to the thin layer of Macaulay’s elite which the British period had spawned./ I closed my eyes again and slept. I never tire dwelling on recycle ribbon for sale Urdu poets having written adoringly on Ram, Krishna, Gokul, Varanasi, Triveni, Koel on a mango perch. Lift your eyes from the Hindi belt and the perspective changes.I missed out on the "tumult" these past weeks in circumstances which remind me of Shah Sarmad, the great Sufi saint of Jewish extraction, who wrote: "I slept through the tumult on Judgment Day.Much of this is wishful thinking as it presupposes that Rahul Gandhi, who has no political victories to his credit yet, somehow has victories lined up in the future simply because he is donning clothes of a certain shade. The unstated theory is — if the Congress embraces soft Hindutva, the BJP will be left with nothing to oppose?This scenario satisfies another great dream of the Indian ruling class — a country proceeding towards a viable two-party system – BJP and Congress, alternatively. Britain, anchored to the Anglican Church, has a Muslim mayor of London; all religious denominations are in the Cabinet (and shadow cabinet), indeed, at one stage there were four Muslims in the English cricket team..Quite seamlessly we had glided from the British Raj to a Hindu Raj. Political profitability in Rahul Gandhi’s frenetic temple-hopping has yet to be assessed. I dwell in some detail on this theme in my book Being The Other: The Muslim in India. But accepting the label, Hindu Raj, was against his self-image. In fact, the Hindutva wave in Gujarat must be considered on the wane as recent state elections make clear. The problem the Congress created was precisely this — having created Hindu Raj, it proceeded to deny its existence. This image must be discarded at all costs because it gives the Hindutva brigade a handle for communal polarisation.This blissful state fell into my lot, quite paradoxically, in the benign care of Dr Cyrus Shroff, who quite brilliantly stitched together an injured retina in surgery that lasted two and a half hours, and confined me to bed upside down, quite literally, adding a new dimension to my yogic experience. In the current situation the gloom and doom about fascism having arrived seems premature./ When I half opened my eyes to see if it was over,/ I saw that it was still continuing. Just imagine what bargain 180 million Muslims would not have been in a position to strike?Let me, in my Yoga Nidra state, pull back my consciousness from issues of what "might-have-been".

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The 69th BarrelOld Fashioned with a twist! Vat 69 Whisky served with star anise and appleGlassware: RocksIngredients:Vat 69 Whisky60 mlStar Anise2 NosApple Juice45 mlAngosutra Bitters2DropsMethod: Pour your ingredients one after the other in glass and build it up, gently stir it and your drink is ready!Garnish: CherriesJames JulepGlassware: High BallIngredientsBlack and White Whisky 45 mlHoney Water 45 mlMint leaves 20 nosSoda top upMethod: Take a high ball glass and pour the whisky and honey waterone after the other. Top it up with soda and a mint sprig on the edge.Garnish: Apple and cinnamonRed Label MuleGlassware: High BallIngredientsJohnnie Walker Red Label 45 mlAngostura bitters 2 dropsLime Slice 2 nosGinger Ale top upMethodTake a high ball glass and gently pour the ingredients one after the other.

Top it up with Ginger Ale and some lemon slices. Serve it in a rock glass with a slice of apple and cinnamon China cotton tape Ribbon Suppliers sticks on the edge.Garnish: Lemon slice.Garnish: Mint SprigBlack Dog Gold CoinGlassware: RocksIngredientsBlack Dog Triple Gold Reserve 60 mlCinnamon syrup 15 mlSauvignon blanc 30 mlMethod: Take all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker and gently shake it.

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