Patrice and I were invited out to dinner with Rajiv and his wife in central Kanpur to a South Indian restaurant and on the way there we stopped at the market to do some clothes shopping.
So clothes shopping Isn’t typically a guy thing but in India you get a totally different shopping experience but i have to say this was really fun. You are far more actively involved in the final product and it is a process rather than just picking something off the rack. It started in a couple of fabric shops that we went to which had reams of different multicolorued fabrics of varying grades; whether you wanted silk, linen, cottons or blends of varying thicknesses and qualities they had everything. As Patrice pointed out so well, it is a gender equal shopping experience with a similar range of colours and patterns for men and women which is very uncommon in the west. The fabric is chosen on lengths depending on what garment you want it made into (long or short sleeve, pockets etc)
After that we went to a shopping mall to mainly have a look around. It was remarkably western with all the shops you would expect in a British shopping center including an M&S. there was however a stark contrast between gender here. In one shop we walked into I thought that one half of the shop had western clothes and the other traditional Indian but it was actually just men’s and women’s. There is an existing legacy from colonial time where men dressed in a western style whilst women wore traditional dress which is still in affect today.