Que sari Sarah

Last night I was invited to be a guest at a the local Rotary Club’s ‘Indian Night’ – the club’s President happens to be Indian, and they brought in a guest speaker who was a Melbourne nursing specialist in cardiac recouperation, who’d been headhunted by a cardiac surgeon from Hyderabad to set up a similar program in India.

My biggest challenge of the night was how to tie my sari successfully!  It must have been about 25 years ago when I travelled to India and Nepal, and the beautiful silk sari I bought at that time has never been worn in the intervening decades. I had every intention of making it into a dress, but could never quite dream up something that would make best use of the border prints. Thank goodness I didn’t chop it up ! It was somehow satisfying that I finally got to wear it in its intended fashion.

Last night was an evening full of statistics. Now, those sorts of presentations can be deadly boring, but the young nursing specialist who gave the presentation successfully avoided that by plying us with a good deal of surprising and interesting commentary.

Did you know, for example, that both India and China have a cardiac disease epidemic? That the rates of preventable cardiac disease apparently exceed that of Europe and the west?

Why has this happened? Because India has, and has very quickly, adopted the worst of our sedentary pastimes and poor  eating habits. Their boom in the IT related industries (and think too of all those call centres across India) has meant those who were previously having to work hard out in the fields in agriculture (thus getting a good dose of exercise at the same time), are now sitting at a desk all day. And they’re making poor diet choices, just like us (though I suspect theirs might be somewhat ghee laden too).

The poverty situation also got a mention – I think that about 27% of the population live below the poverty line (which, at present, equates to an income of something less than $10 Australian per month. And over 60% of the Indian population get by on under $1 US per day.

But the gap between rich and poor was never so well illustrated as by the program that this nursing specialist was employed to set up. It sounded impressive: a 2 week course for patients post bypass surgery, that included education about diet and lifestyle, as well as a tailored exercise programme. It cost each participant the equivalent of $300 Australian paid up front.  But, hey! Based on her previous stats, the majority of the country will be excluded from participation. Yes, that’s right – and unless India decides to dedicate more than just 2% of its funds to healthcare, looks like that’s the way it will stay.

unRavel’in

Today I had every best intention of posting about my weekend’s activities – I went and saw the wonderful Rufus Wainwright in Melbourne on Saturday, and also commenced a new WIP.

However, my intentions were lost once I found myself on the Ravelry site trying to upload a few of my designs. I didn’t expect it to take quite so long: searching out images, delving into my laptop to find the original pattern instructions that I wrote, and then trying to find the relevant links on Ravelry – yarn brands, publishers etc – in order to tie it all together. I haven’t finished yet, but have at least made decent inroads to the cataloguing of some of my designs. Even if some of them might be a touch obscure, it’s a really useful exercise in gathering together a bit of a portfolio of some of the handknitting patterns that I’ve designed and written.  I realised today that I’ve got extensive details and images of the knitwear collections that I’ve previously designed as ready-to-wear, but when I moved into pattern writing (generally freelancing for other companies or publications, but also self-publishing on a small scale) my record keeping is generally well hidden in the bowels of my laptop, with the master copies of my patterns filed away on CD back-ups.

So, Rufus will have to wait until I’ve got a bit more time. If you’re interested in the brief  version, his show was absolutely brilliant!