Week 3: Drowning in toys (Continued)

On the 3rd day of this week, we decided to head back into Channapatna, with a bigger aim of creating a brief of anything specific in Channapatna.
At first we headed to Kalanagar, a Muslim predominant area in Channapatna. The aim here was to notice the differences and similarities this area had compared to Neelsandra.

• Most of the toys here were made using machines making this area more dependent on electricity where as in Neelsandra everything was hand made.
• A lot of Chemicals were used for colouring the toys compared to Neelsandra which used more vegetable colours.
• The toys made here ranged from simple toys of animals to much more complicated ones like big trophies and idols while most of the toys in Neelsandra were simple hand made toys, the max they would go up to were car seat covers.
• Located close to Maya Organic, which provides training for youth for toy making but there was no special training provided to anyone in Neelsandra. The next generation would either learn from their parents or would leave the village and industry of toy making to join IT or engineering.

Pretty sad but that is the current state of Neelsandra. In fact the situation is similar in Kalanagar. The future generation do not seem to be interested in making toys. The parents too prefer their children studying high tech engineering or joining IT firms in metropolitan cities. This has taken a toll on an industry which had been blooming for over 500 years. So, we decided to get the children's perspective in and around through a different medium










These little drawings here were done by the kids bringing out whatever is in their minds regarding Channapatna. I guess these are self- explainatory. You still see toys at a large.

This day may not have been really productive but it gave us a foundation for what we wanted to do next week.