Fashion still doesn’t give a damn about…

…the deaths of garment workers

To the Guardian article by Lucy Siegle to which the image above points, I add from what I’ve seen:

Bargaining is tough when buyers from transnationals fly down to set hourly rates with manufacturers. Decisions to move away to lower-cost sellers are taken in an instant and aggressive sellers desperate to cover overhead do everything they can (but shouldn’t) to meet target prices. Both sides are at fault in this dynamic, so it is the market economy that’s at fault, and who can change this situation but roused people moving their governments?

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The sounds we heard last evening at Nandi Thota. We were on the upper deck of our bungalow. The humid air promised rain whereas the sky was clear. The birds were subdued and the crickets were muted, as though they were both doing a sound check to improve their performance. It was bedtime for the birds and starting time for the crickets and they should both have been shrill.

Now in the morning the leaves of the coffee plants are glowing with life given them by the dew. The sounds of the birds and the crickets are downed by the chug and drone of our neighbour’s pump. It is draining the stream that separates our plantations.

I’ve pulled on my headphones and tapped on Tom Waits. But audio above is of last evening’s.

Source: SoundCloud / Shashikiran Mullur

malnad diarykarnatakaindiacoffee

In this video a 9-year-old boy drives a Ferrari in Kerala with a child aged five beside him and nobody else is in the car. He cannot pull on the seat belt because if he did his feet wouldn’t reach the pedals. The video was filmed by his mother and she uploaded the video to YouTube—full of pride and ignorant of wrongdoing.

The police took the father into custody. The video has gone viral and also the outrage so I’m not altogether ashamed of this episode that happened in India.

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