Weave La Sari

India’s Traditional Drape Is Seeing A Happy Revival Across The Country. A Whole New Sorority Is Emerging Around The Six Yards, With Young Women Who Have Never Worn A Sari Before Taking To It With Wacky Abandon

- Chinki Sinha

A conversation-starter, an easy topic to bond over, a paean to nostalgia and memory. The sari is having its moment. When Shital Mahajan Rane, 36, wore a pink Nauvari Maharashtrian nine-yard sari instead of a highperformance freefly jumpsuit, the international audience at the Thai Skydiving Centre in Pattaya sat up and took note. That was in February 2018, when the Padmashri awardee and holder of 17 national and six world records, made yet another skydiving mark by jumping from a height of 13,000 feet in a sari. To prove that Indian women are capable of excelling at anything.

In 1976, when she had looked into the mirror and found a young woman dressed in a pink and blue Narayanpet sari her mother gave her to wear in junior college staring back at her, Tejdeep Kaur Menon had said to herself: “A woman is born.” Today, the 1983 batch IPS officer and DGP Telangana, is part of the Global Saree Pact, a Facebook group which boasts more than 15,000 members who have decided to wear 100 saris a year, come hail or storm.