Fashion Communication’s semester 5 brought in the subject Craft Publication. The task was to pick a craft, learn everything that there is to know about it, and make a coffee-table book on the craft as the end-term deliverable. The fact that the brief can be explained in 3 simple phrases is no indication of the simplicity of the task itself (or its lack thereof).
As a group of four, we chose Bidri as our craft for one simple reason – it’s ridiculously beautiful. Studying the craft meant going to workshops and meeting craftsmen. We were lucky that Hyderabad is a major centre of the craft, so we got a good deal of research out of our way from local craftsmen, museums and libraries. Nevertheless, a trip to Bidar, Karnataka – the town after which the very craft is named, was all but mandatory.
Our main purpose behind going to Bidar was photography. A coffee-table book is only as good as its photographs; and we needed quality images of the city, its architecture, and of course Bidriware itself, to use in our book. So we picked a date when we were free and spoke to our mentor. He lent us some portable lights to shoot, and scoffed at the weather forecast that described Bidar’s weather for the proposed date as, and I quote, “Thunderstorms”.
So early in the morning, we equipped ourselves with four cameras, the lights we borrowed, and a tripod (which also was borrowed), and hopped onto the outstation cab we booked. And we would’ve headed straight to Bidar, except the cab driver couldn’t seem to be able to start the trip on his phone. After having wasted a good 15 minutes of everybody’s time, we were asked to book another cab. So book another cab we did. Having lost sleep on a Saturday morning, we wondered if we should just take it as a sign from the universe and go back home. We really should have.
Our cab arrived after a wait of about 90 minutes – time we spent sitting by the side of the road, having breakfast that was packed for the trip, and freaking out over almost breaking the (expensive) tripod we had borrowed. I’d like to say that we got into the cab, went to Bidar, had a productive day of the work, and came back home. But that wasn’t quite the case.
After a gruelling 120-odd kilometres, that weather forecast came back to bite us in the rear. A mere 20 kilometres away from our destination, we found ourselves backed up in traffic on a mud road that led to a massive pond of rainwater collected where a road once was. Thunderstorms indeed.
We asked around, and tried going some distance on an alternate route, but the rain showed no signs of stopping. And even if we did make it to Bidar, any remaining natural light we had would’ve been long gone. So much for architectural photography.
It was a dejected 120 kilometres back, spent mostly in silence, and drifting in and out of sleep. And I’d like to say that we planned the trip for another day, went to Bidar, clicked amazing photographs, and made a coffee-table book we couldn’t be more proud of. And that’s exactly what happened.
But more on that later.
Nocturnal Narratives 