Yesterday was inevitably going to be hectic as I tried to meet as many people as I could and keep my horizons as wide as possible, but today I endeavored to narrow my focus a little and spend some more time with the people who are at the heart of this story – the silk weavers and their families. The afternoon was spent talking to this group of village women, whose perspective was just as colourful as their saris. I had spent the morning in one weaver’s home and workshop, chatting to him about life, his hopes for the future and, inevitably, cricket. He told me excitedly about the time he had travelled from his village into Varanasi to join the crowds trying to catch a glimpse of the visiting Indian cricket captain, and basking in today’s glorious sunshine it was easy to see how much he enjoyed watching the young locals thumping the ball around with their home-carved bat. His real passion, however, was for his craft, and it was impossible not to get a sense from him of just how important weaving is as a facet of his identity. My own ambitions to work as a writer are certainly not driven primarily by a desire to be economically rewarded, and similarly his passion for his art transcended any question of working only for survival.
I am reticent to talk too much about him, however, as I sense he will play a major role in the article I eventually write, so I’ll move on to tell you about my lunch at Burger King. This was not the chain Burger King, but a smallish Varanasi restaurant which had bizarrely purloined the name of the giant American franchise. I say bizarrely, because in a country which worships the cow to the extent of letting it rule the roads and even, in one famous Varanasi example, live in a clothes shop, the chances of you getting a Beef Burger are similar to your chances of being served a Labrador Burger at Crufts. So when I saw that this restaurant lived up to it’s name and offered ‘burgers’ amongst the daal and naan, I ordered immediately, as much out of curiosity as desire. What arrived was a ‘paneer burger’, a deep fried slab of goat’s cheese served with onions in what was basically a hot dog bun, and accompanied by quintessentially American ketchup and mustard pots. It wasn’t as bad as that sounds, but something had definitely been lost in cultural translation. McTikka would be just as odd.
Yesterday was inevitably going to be hectic as I tried to meet as many people as I could and keep my horizons as wide as possible, but today I endeavored to narrow my focus a little and spend some more time with the people who are at the heart of this story – the silk weavers and their families. The afternoon was spent talking to this group of village women, whose perspective was just as colourful as their saris. I had spent the morning in one weaver’s home and workshop, chatting to him about life, his hopes for the future and, inevitably, cricket. He told me excitedly about the time he had travelled from his village into Varanasi to join the crowds trying to catch a glimpse of the visiting Indian cricket captain, and basking in today’s glorious sunshine it was easy to see how much he enjoyed watching the young locals thumping the ball around with their home-carved bat. His real passion, however, was for his craft, and it was impossible not to get a sense from him of just how important weaving is as a facet of his identity. My own ambitions to work as a writer are certainly not driven primarily by a desire to be economically rewarded, and similarly his passion for his art transcended any question of working only for survival. 
I am reticent to talk too much about him, however, as I sense he will play a major role in the article I eventually write, so I’ll move on to tell you about my lunch at Burger King. This was not the chain Burger King, but a smallish Varanasi restaurant which had bizarrely purloined the name of the giant American franchise. I say bizarrely, because in a country which worships the cow to the extent of letting it rule the roads and even, in one famous Varanasi example, live in a clothes shop, the chances of you getting a Beef Burger are similar to your chances of being served a Labrador Burger at Crufts. So when I saw that this restaurant lived up to it’s name and offered ‘burgers’ amongst the daal and naan, I ordered immediately, as much out of curiosity as desire. What arrived was a ‘paneer burger’, a deep fried slab of goat’s cheese served with onions in what was basically a hot dog bun, and accompanied by quintessentially American ketchup and mustard pots. It wasn’t as bad as that sounds, but something had definitely been lost in cultural translation. McTikka would be just as odd.
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