DNA Mumbai Anniversary: Revolutionary Roads

From providing decades of advice on sex to starting up unconventional fashion labels in foreign lands, these personalities strike it big by living out their passions

Puneet Chawla: The power of online

Time was, when the only place to source traditional Indian textiles and crafts was in government emporia or FabIndia – and then too, what you saw or got depended on the merchandise they could source and stock in one physical space. The entry of e-commerce in this area – Jaypore, especially, which was the first one to really strike it big – has been a huge game changer, opening up a world of diverse handcraft/hand-woven traditions to consumers from anywhere – within India or across the world.

Jaypore had begun in 2012 by Shilpa Sharma, who’d had several years of experience with FabIndia in the product development and  merchandising, and Puneet Chawla (inset), an IT professional who had worked with several e-commerce firms, the last retailing India-inspired products to the US market. The idea was to offer Indian communities abroad – a very big and closely knit group of consumers – a range of products and garments from back home. It was sure to succeed, especially with the distinctive range that Sharma, thanks to her experience, could source from vendors in remote parts of the country. Thus Jaypore started in the US, initially, launching in India a year later. Bootstrapped at first by the two co-founders, it soon got a Rs 2 crore seed fund; a $5 million investment from venture capital firm Aavishkaar followed in February 2016, and another $2 million in 2017. A year ago, the firm also went the off-line route, with stores in Delhi and Mumbai, realising that its customer base, mostly slightly older women, were more comfortable with the traditional, touch-see mode of shopping.

Traditional kundan inspired jewellery; (inset) Puneet Chawla

However much Jaypore has benefitted customers, offering them a wide range of apparel, textiles, furnishings, jewellery, footwear, home and kitchen ware, etc a cursor click away, it has benefitted artisans and designers, especially young and upcoming ones, the most. Jaypore today works with more than 800 artisans and exports make up more than one-fourth of its business, opening up a new, more efficient and cheaper mode of reaching the wealth of our handicrafts to a global market. Given how many people the artisanal sectors give employment to, the online model, given a fillip by Jaypore, and the many others that have followed in its footsteps, has the potential to be a real game-changer.

Ashish Gupta: The shock and awe

To bring an Indian influence to an international ramp is not new. But Ashish Gupta sets aside the exotica and pageantry and instead digs into the bins of kitschy India for his eponymous label Ashish based out of London.

Headless mannequins that stand as sentries to the small shops selling Bangkok wares made it to his Fall 2018 ramp. The models wore hairy neon plastic garlands favoured by truck drivers and deities overseeing the fortunes of Udipi joints, and  clasped generic plastic bags. A sweatshirt etched out the MasterCard slogan in Ashish’s trademark sequins… but said Masturbate and American Excess.

Wearing a spangled top, marched a muscular model with cascading curls and swinging jhumkas, an exotic echo of the members of the hijra community commonly seen busking at traffic signals.

Taylor Swift wore an Ashish sequinned houndstooth crop top and joggers to the 2015 MTV awards, and he has designed for Madonna, Miley Cyrus and Rihanna. But underlying Gupta’s playful obsession with sequins is meaty craftsmanship. His 20-year-old designs are sought after in vintage shops as much as they are fresh off the runway.

The designer was born to two doctors in Delhi and grew up there, studied Fine Art (though he knew he wanted to make clothes  when he was 12) and moved to London to pursue a masters in Central St Martin (where he says, he could finally be “himself”). He first showed at Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai in 2005. 

And though he does not consider himself a part of the Indian fashion scene “I moved to London to study fashion,” he once told a newspaper, “and have lived and worked there pretty much ever since.. I was unable to get a place to study at any of the fashion schools in India, so I guess I would not be considered a part of the Indian fashion scene in that sense”, his clothes are still made in India, with his mother overseeing the workshop.

Sequins and tinsel are his mediums. “When I started using sequins, they were regarded as cheap embellishment,” he told the Telegraph once, “ but I always thought they were an art form. Working with sequins is quite technical, involving a totally different way of working with the fabric. People always ask me why I’m still doing sequins but they are no less valid than a brand whose signature is trench coats or digital prints.”

Ashish Gupta with his kitchen tap

In the performance of his clothes is the cheekiness and rebelliousness of a plain-clothed, middle-class boy coughing on his first cigarette.  In 2013, he turned the display window in Browns Focus boutique on South Molton Street (the London boutique, which gave a leg up to the likes of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen  and one of his first steadfast buyers)  into a sex shop to shock the posh little street. 

And though he lives in London now and is entrenched in its fashion scene, the act of an Indian bringing the sensibility of a fluorescent railway station bazaar to that ramp is an act of rebellion we can’t miss.

Dr Mahinder Watsa: Sex & the city

He’s 94 but his sharp reflexes and sharper wit could give any 20 plus something a run for their money. Sexologist, sex-educator, sex-therapist and one of the country’s best-known columnists Dr Mahinder C Watsa is seen as the last word on anything sex in India.

Apart from his sexpert column where he takes questions on everything from penis-size anxiety, masturbation, premature ejaculation, infertility, erectile dysfunction, vaginismus, sexual positions and what have you, he’s inundated with calls and email queries through the day from far-flung corners of the country by people who see hope in him. “This is not about me but about the utter paucity of services where people can go and talk confidently without being judged and get sound advice,” offers the doctor modestly.

From being raised in Rangoon where his father was an army physician to meeting his late Sindhi wife while still in medical school Dr Watsa doesn’t seem to suffer the conventional gladly. After a brief stint in the UK through the 1950s, he would return to work with the a pharma major and also practice as a gynaecologist-obstetrician. He gave it all up in the mid-70s to focus exclusively on sexual health. He had earlier spoken to this writer about how age was catching up after five decades of practice. A not-so-steady hand made him explore other avenues. Since sex-therapists and counsellors in India were unheard of and even in medical quarters this subject was kept hush-hush and he seemed to be filling a vacuum.

His current column (which has inspired a namesake documentary) is not his first. Answering health-related queries for publications began for the nonagenarian in the early 70s with magazines like Trend, Femina and Flair. However, he remembers how it was taboo to even mention sex in those publications. “Once a reader in Femina filed a suit saying that the letters were made up. The judge threw the case out when the Editor Sathya Saran sent him a bag of unopened ones to see for himself.”

Dr Mahinder Watsa at his Mumbai residence

Over the years he says it is nice to see women opening up about sexual and reproductive health and coming forward to ask questions. Admitting that India still has long way to go, he feels this speaks of the tectonic shift in attitudes related to sex. “Strides in sexual and reproductive health are an integral part of women’s empowerment.”

Almost everyone who interacts with him wants to know about his razor-sharp wit with which he tackles the most laughable questions, the fact that it has spawned a number of Facebook fan pages on Facebook and gets tweeted about. “All I am trying to do is avoid technical medical language,” he offers.

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