Wonderland could be here, Alice must be Told!

You could go back and forth down the few shops on Parliament Street, several times before spotting the metallic painted doors leading into the corridor store that People Tree is. And right where it proclaims itself, a metal bird sits,… frequently accompanied by grey pigeon chests heaving roundly making quiet company on either side. . .But I noticed this much later…

Earlier when I was a browser /shopper simply (now I am a browser, shopper and paytaker--mercifully!), I took my peopletree newspaper bag, jagged and torn, with a Peopletree sticker on one side and a KarmMarg sticker on the other, and pasted it upon the only hospitable surface in my home. Possibly, I wanted to keep it talking and making repeated encounters with me.

I would look at it and a curious cheer would rise inside me... It was using newsprint, a look at which will never fail to pull you down. That is if you are not looking at the magazine pages, a single sighting of which will convince you that the martians are here, and they are all female and they all look exactly like each other, that expressions and wrinkles are human things, getting rare.

Well, here was newsprint that actually made the Environment? Children/People? Ideas? Craft? --matter, and Aesthetically.
Nor did it keep itself a secret. It just went out using any gladraggers' fingers to educate.

frequently. Somebody a m b l e s in here, picks a little something…pauses at something. Suddenly lifts up a head straight to stare at the wall. Shrinkingly pokes into the bookstore in thoughtful per m i s s i o n…gazes and gazes at the book rows. "ummm..what kind of books do you keep….these are different aren't they?…""Ah..aaa. O. ya.""Nice, nice. Very nice." Then the corridor where they might look at the oil and the incense, the silk stack beneath. ….Back out, up there beneath the fan are those…they are for sale? Those are sitting people?, monkey !, deers? arabesquely ledged up …Omigod.

Wonderland could be here, Alice must be told!
I see that expression at least d a i l y…as if reality got touched by a magic wand. Out come all the alternatives within one's mind, out comes the mindplay that naturally occurs over every common place object whether it is pins one is twiddling with or broken crockery one is efficiently disposing away….and one is seeing these thrown away things taking a second and more excitingly individual life. Amazingly those little odd shapes the mind yearns for, become validated….coke tin toys, key pendant!

A part that does not necessarily get lived in the usual day, gets outlet here. An irresistable high tide 'mainstream,' in its plasticity, hyper colors and ever presence moves swift and slick. So ones' awareness stays largely outside oneself….x's wedding, such and such company, so and so ladder… circus of thought !

At People tree is where one makes a pause, having walked in simply to shop. One finds ones own impact!…So I can make plastic disappear from my life in these ways…? So I support better childhoods in these ways…? And I can be at that cultural sit in…?
Shopping does not intimidate as labels and images might, and before one knows it one has picked up a recycled fabric bits KarmMarg wallet.

Or a kurta in a fabric that has identifiable ingredients…like this flower and that vegetable….fabric that has a story..…the longtimeago friend from Ahmedabad designed the block, the Rajasthani man with the 'eyes' carved it, the Delhi couple that composed/arranged it on cloth,…. so and so who chose the colour combo, and s/he that designed it……
That buy builds intimacy with everything about. Suddenly what one chooses to have feels 'right' not simply because it looks cool but because it takes care not to tax its resources. What goes home becomes a hard--found….like attar or spices must have been in old times.
touch something and Know what it might be. The wholetall story Innocent.* Umilitant* *simple life/…day decisions. . .*

People tree is simply the door swinging between alternatives and alternatives. Those paper bags come from a comfortably, mindful place, and one does not have the burden of turning sides khade paon …..

the bags get turned about, cause smiles and people take them as souvenirs.
There are however, those who mindfully say….no bag please!