The most rewarding part of any form of creation is seeing the final product that used to be a figment of your imagination, turn into reality, turn into something that you can now touch, hold, feel. Something that you can now share with other people and let them experience it the way you experienced it when it was just a seed in your imagination. 

It’s the way an architect turns an idea into a home, a painter turns it into a painting, an engineer into a product, and a weaver turns it into yards and yards of beautiful fabric.

Not too many months ago, a video of this process, of a weaver rattling his wooden loom with carefully arranged threads on one side and churning out a patterned cloth from the other side caught my eye. That instantly brought back memories of traveling across Chettinad, a small village in Tamil Nadu, gawking at colourful wooden houses, and entering into a few to find weavers at work surrounded by colourful fabric.

This quickly escalated into an obsession of watching videos of fabric being weaved, of layers of colours being screen printed on pure white cloth, of artisans stamping away to create delightful block prints, of soft cloth being adorned with intricate designs using colourful thread. That led to spending hours watching interviews by leaders in this industry, watching Anita Dongre sit amongst her artisans and talk endlessly about the versatility of Indian textiles, watching Manish Malhotra walk down the ramp showing off the intricacy of his designs. 

Thus, new seeds were planted for creating designs from these beautiful patterns found on the textiles of India. 

And now, I’m bringing to you ‘Bunnai’ a small piece of my imagination now turned into Akarkhana’s new collection.

‘Bunnai' is now yours to touch, hold, wear, adorn and show off.