The Konmari Conquest

Freedom of space; tidying as self-care; and a joyful life—that’s the global allure of the KonMari method. We are now making it our own, despite our ethos of maximal living.

- Manidipa Mandal

When Mousumi Ray, 45, assistant professor at a Delhi college and mother to a teenager, complained last year that she had run out of storage space again, a friend introduced her to an interesting way to fold clothes to fit more into less space. “It was love at first fold!” says Mousumi of her introduction to the KonMari method of organisation. “One glance at the drawers of neatly folded clothes, having the resilience to stay unperturbed under the onslaught of hurried hands, and I fell for it.”

Detailed by Japanese organising consultant Marie Kondo in her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011), this method of decluttering till you own only what “sparks joy” has spawned thousands of Facebook groups, Instagram feeds and YouTube videos. For someone who started reading home and lifestyle magazines at five, Marie struggled to find organisational zen in her family home, spending hours ‘tidying’ daily and learning the hard way to leave family members’ possessions out of it. She was inspired (literally) at 15 to undertake “a study of tidying” after a fainting spell brought on by organisational stress, which pushed her to devise the KonMari method. At 19, as â€‹a university student, she had launched her own consultancy.