Six Yards and 365 days opens Chapter in Rajasthan

The event was a major success with people from Jaipur and around who came together to celebrate and discuss about the well working of the community and the sarees. The event saw some well-known people like Padma Shri Pandita Tripti Mukherjee, from US, a senior disciple of Sangeet Martand Pandit Jasraj. Aditi Mukherjee from Kolkata was there to celebrate the meet and join hands with Sunita Budhiraja in this initiative which has taken the shape of a movement. Archana Dhyani, also a member of Six Yards and 365 Days, completed her 200 drapes of handloom sarees on the day of the event.

Besides Jaipur, there are Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack Chapters of Six Yards and 365 Days where members gather to support the cause. More Chapters like this are soon to be revealed to make people aware of the dying art of handloom sarees. The campaign has been launched to encourage women to engage themselves in this initiative to drape themselves in six yards all the 365 days of a year and to share their own progress with the rest of the members of the community.

“I am thrilled to see that the idea of Six yards and 365 days is wide spreading so wonderfully and all my friends are in attendance to celebrate this new chapter here with me in Jaipur. I am delighted to see the growth of Six yards and 365 days which started with the basic idea of supporting the weavers and how now it has created a community of women who come together to support each other not only for their clothing but emotionally too,” said Budhiraja.

Budhiraja started the ‘Six Yards and 365 Days, saree movement’, a Facebook campaign in sync with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India initiative in August 2015. The group now comprises over 32,000 handloom saree lovers from across the world and counting. Each member of the group religiously drapes handloom saree every day.

The virtual campaign has not only gathered a lot of momentum but has already crossed 32,000 members spread across over 70 countries, many of whom religiously wear their hand woven sarees with pride, buy hand-woven sarees, have their photographs clicked in the saree almost every day and post it on the Facebook page of this group. And the number is growing. There are more than 500 members who have posted their 100th and 200th and 300th, 365, 500, and 1000 drapes of handloom sarees.

Many of the weaves today are fading out. Members are from different walks of life – high profile artistes and artists, authors, theatre persons, educationists, entrepreneurs, doctors, NGO workers, communication professionals to housewives and weavers who come from underpaid came out of their virtual world to a real world.

Budhiraja is a renowned Hindi poet and author with 11 books to her credit. She has authored the biography of Pandit Jasraj titled ‘Rasraj Pandit Jasraj’. Other works from her pen include ‘SaatSuron ke Beech’ that consists of informal and personal long interviews with legends of Indian music – Ustad Bismillah Khan, Kishan Maharaj, Jasraj, Dr M Balamuralikrishna, Shivkumar Sharma, Birju Maharaj and Hariprasad Chaurasia along with ‘Prashna Paanchali’, ‘Aadhi Dhoop’, ‘Anuttar’ and ‘Tees ka Safar’ to name a few. She has also edited Coffee Table books about Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh. Her works have been translated in English, Rumanian and Telugu.

ALCHEMPro News Desk (PC)