Day 3 - Visit to Chaitra Prints

This morning a short stroll from our hotel took us to Bangalore's only tourist attraction, the Botanical Gardens. The 20 minute walk was the maximum that any sane person would travel on foot and took us past many humorous sights, such as goats tied to lampposts, happily grazing. The fact that there was usually a restaurant next door advertising 'goat curry', I'm sure, had nothing at all to do with this!  We strode up and down uneven pavements, of the variety that certain 'no-blame' claims companies would love and through the choking fumes of the traffic found the gardens. Unfortunately, being winter, only a few water-lilies and a lot of strange, exotic trees were in evidence. After a couple of hours admiring trees, the odd monkey (with head in hands - obviously having an off-day!!!) and chipmunk-spotting, we returned to our hotel to await the car sent by Chaitra Prints.

As with Apsara Silks, Chaitra Prints stood out when I saw them at TexWorld in Paris, due to the Western styling of their designs. Pradeep M.G. meets us at their Bangalore Head Office and tells us that the company was formed in 1984 by his father and brother, who are both fabric technologists. After gaining valuable experience of the Western market whilst working in India for a Glasgow based textile company, they decided to import raw silk fibre from China, dyeing, processing and weaving it at their factory outside Bangalore. Pradeep and his brother then joined the partnership, after gaining degrees at Bangalore University in Business Studies and Garment Production Technology respectively. The company now has the design and production facilities to produce finished products for the apparel and home furnishing markets and exports worldwide.

Pradeep has covered the conference table with a mountain of beadings and embroideries for our attention - just a small selection of Chaitra's range and explains that specials can also be commissioned. It's unusual for designs to be discontinued and the cupboards around the room contain hundreds of further designs, dating as far back as the company's earliest years.

Each plain silk is produced in a myriad of beautiful colours and, by the end of our meeting we are weighed down with shade cards of their range of silk organzas, taffetas and dupions. Like Apsara Silks, Chaitra maintain quality consistency by using European beads and dyes and all hand-beading is knotted after every third bead for strength (it's the bane of most designers’ lives to constantly be picking up beads that have fallen off an imported garment!) Unfortunately, only warehousing and quality control prior to shipping is done at the Bangalore office, so we are unable to marvel at the skill of the embroiderers and beaders but, we can drool over the 60 luscious shades of power and hand-woven dupions that are always kept in stock in the warehouse.

By the end of our meeting, we have whittled down the numerous contenders and commissioned samples for our new range, leaving first patterns for Chaitra's technicians to work with. After introducing us to the other family members, who head the Chaitra Prints team, Pradeep kindly puts the car sent for us at our disposal until the evening.

Revived by a short foot soak at our hotel, we battle with Bangalore traffic on our way to another ultra modern shopping centre. Being India, there are plenty of high quality cotton and linen garments on display - unfortunately, young Indian women have a very slender frame and none of the tops that I try on will accommodate my size 16 bust (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!)

There is an abundance of high quality menswear - candy striped Van Heusen shirts and Italian suits in particular, and we also stumble across the obligatory Marks & Spencer, complete with 'Per Una' range labelled at UK price levels in sterling, as though we were in Basildon high street! It seems rather strange when you've just been calculating rupees to the £ in the previous store!

Most clothing is well finished and comes in at around a half of UK prices. After stumbling through a pitch black department store when the power fails, due to the rainstorm outside, we decide to try out the food hall. A surprisingly varied and tasty choice of pizzas, seafood and Chinese and local delights entice us. Ignore the fact that the streets outside are dusty and chaotic, the outlets are extremely clean and hygienic - I have yet to see staff in KFC and McDonalds handling food with gloves!

By now the downpour has stopped and it's time to unwind in our favourite rock bar on MG road. By midnight we are back at our hotel, after surviving the fastest tuc-tuc ride ever, careering around corners on two wheels to the accompaniment of a Boom Box in the back! Our woolly balaclava wearing driver, Absul (the evenings are chilly in Bangalore!), kindly gives us his card with mobile phone number in case we need his services in the future. Maybe it's the cocktails, but I'm sure my knees don't normally shake like this! Tomorrow our adventure will be over, but more on our final experiences of Bangalore...

Fiona x

Fiona Thomson Design