Ajit, the Bra King of Bangalore

We had a birthday party for Sanju’s roommate, T, the other night.  In most respects, it was about the same thing as an American birthday.  There was beer and wine, music and people dancing, people pulling up funny stuff on YouTube, delivered Thai food, and a cake.  Pretty much the same thing we’d do in the US.  But we dodged two traditions, though, that I can’t tell if they’re Indian or too American.  The first was “birthday bumps,” which apparently involve tossing somebody into the air, usually resulting in them hitting them the ground hard, repeated for the number of years you are.  T refused, and I was told only girls are allowed to refuse birthday bumps.  T also was very very hesitant to even approach the cake, as apparently in India the cake always winds up in the face of whoever’s birthday it is.  Kanika, my outside counsel for all things Indian, was sorely disappointed that there were no birthday bumps or cake-in-the-face.

But I also got to meet Sanju’s cousin, whom I’ll call Ajit (most names here will be replaced), who until recently ran a successful underwear business, specializing in bras, which he distributed to stores in South India.  He decided, one day, to expand into the plus-size market, and began distributing bras described as large to enormous.  These bras started to sell.  Like hot cakes.  And he couldn’t figure out why.  He’d call the stores and get dodgy answers.  But when he found that one store in Kerala was selling 1,000s of these per week, he decided to take a trip to the store to figure out what was going on.  When he got there, he found that they were selling because Ramadan was coming up.  The owner was taking the bras, cutting out the cups, and selling them as prayer caps.  Which sold extremely well, because unlike most cheap scratchy prayer caps, these were soft and comfortable, but still affordable.  This continued, but after Ramadan, was not quite as big of a deal.  Ajit’s business started to slip when he expanded into the very competitive undershirt market, and he sold it at a substantial profit.

Sorry if you’re looking for a moral in this post.  I say if a story involves enormous bras being converted to prayer caps, it pretty much speaks for itself.