Good piece in the NYTimes today (the Fashion section, no less) about Kakuben Lalabhai Parmar, an artisan from India whose story embodies "a half-century of global feminism and the evolutionary arc of modern India."
“My group was treated as untouchables,” said Ms. Parmar, 50. And if the community was untouchable, its female members were still more disadvantaged by being invisible. ...“Yet here she was in Midtown Manhattan last weekend, wrapping her arms around the strangers who gather there regularly to dispense affection, some of them understandably astonished at the apparition clad in a mirror-spangled skirt and a tie-dyed shawl, her throat and hands and arms lavishly adorned with the homemade tattoos that are a form of what Ms. Parmar termed 'affordable beautification' in the far reaches of Gujarat.”
