Cane you promise a jhoola tomorrow?

CHENNAI: More than thirty years have passed since a young man named G Palani weaved his first cane basket. It was a hole in the wall shop on GN Chetty road right at the tip of where Anna Flyover was being constructed that year where Palani started work. As the years passed, this cane weaver has made many a chair or piece of furniture, almost all of the exact same timeless design. He watched as the outside of his workspace change dramatically around him — flashy cars, upmarket restaurants and crowded streets. Similar to Anna Flyover, largely a part of Chennai’s furniture today, a present day traffic relic if you may, nothing much has changed as he continues to weave in his corner in the dark shop. Palani (63) rues, “We once had three shops on this road but now only one remains. Not much has developed for us since I started working.”Cane furniture shops have seen hard times since, perhaps largely because workmen are not attracted to the trade anymore. In their generation point, men were driven to this profession either because of unemployment or in some cases, the odd injury as N Mani (35), another cane weaver, reveals, “Five years ago, I was working in a tea shop near Blue Star in Anna Nagar. Then one day, I suffered a paralytic stroke in the left hand, so I started doing this.” Mani tells his story from a small workshop off the Anna Nagar Main Road, where his single task through the day is to use his working right hand to bind cane round and round a near finished product.Apparently it takes over four months of apprenticeship to develop the skill, and different stages in the making of a piece are assigned to different people. These range from making cuts on the wood, at the right places for cutting and softening with a blowtorch, after which the raw material is shaved smooth, put together as a finished piece and then varnished to perfection. Manikandan, 35, another cane weaver at Anna Nagar,  explains, “You have to be very accurate with your measurement when you make a cut, because if you get it wrong, the whole thing can come apart.” He adds, “I started learning when I was 15, these days youngsters don’t have the patience.”E Raja (41), a veteran in the business and currently the owner of this shop in Anna Nagar, was once a cane weaver himself. He started learning at the age of 13 at a night school that taught trades such as mechanics, carpentry and the like at Tiruvannamalai. He says, “Most of the workers in other cane shops in the city you will find, once trained under a man in Royapettah, near the Swagath hotel. He used to teach everybody  and had 80 people working under him, but now the store is no more.” The grand old man of cane was called Michael; perhaps he stopped teaching because there were no more students to mentor.