Dinesh Himatsingka is a Design Maverick
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Image: Mallikarjun Katakol for Forbes India
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Dinesh Himatsingka
Profile: Founder and Managing Director, Himatsingka Seide
His Insights:
• Design can be appreciated only when we are aware of the idea of beauty
• There is nothing called Indian design. There is only good design. Design has no nationality.
We are driving to Dodaballapur, a little over 40 kilometres beyond the hubbub of Bangalore city’s IT sprawl; the road winds through vineyards and hamlets that will one day give way to ‘development’. For now, it is still serene, basking in the winter sun of early December.
I am in the car with Dinesh Himatsingka, a reticent man in his early sixties. He makes for an unlikely candidate to be India’s leading exporter of high-quality, high-priced drapery to discerning buyers in Europe and the United States. He makes it for the rich and says he’d rather make money off them. His company Himatsingka Seide’s turnover is around Rs. 1,200 crore, but his is not the usual Indian textile exports story. Dinesh Himatsingka is a worshipper of design and in his products the design rules the form.
As we ride the distance, I sense he is somewhat distracted and I probe deeper. It turns out that in faraway Kolkata, his 101-year-old father has been suddenly taken unwell. The man has been a lawyer of great standing, who has appeared in court until just five years ago. I offer to cancel the conversation; we are close to the airport and I suggest he take the flight to be at his father’s side. Dinesh suddenly comes out of his distraction and says, no, his father would not approve of that at all. Let us talk, he says. In that moment, I understand the meaning of work ethic and what makes some of us what we are.
On the paternal side, Dinesh comes from Bhagalpur in Bihar. During his early days and subsequent trips, he was taken by the work of the weavers of that region. In the warp and weft of the artisans, he saw his own passion and also found his pain.
The passion came from an intuitive, unexplainable draw from the thread. The pain emanated from the fact that over and over again, the weavers were repeating the same designs and their artisanship was falling short of art; as long as the buyer, seller, the intermediaries and the workers made some money, no one questioned why design should not question pattern. Dinesh started asking the weavers to weave his designs. Then he took them to his buyers. In 1985, a chance introduction to an Italian architect got him thinking.
“Westerners have so much beautiful fabric, huge amounts. I asked myself, why can’t we do it? They do not have monopoly on good taste. Let me find out how they do it, I told myself. That is when I realised that it is all about technology and application. You had to apply design through technology. I came back and started building the technology infrastructure to scale-up great design. I was criticised by fellow traders as mad. I told everyone, this is what I want to do and this is what I will do.”
I interject. I have something to tell Dinesh: Two decades ago, I was in front of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. It is the most visited monument in the United States that lists the 58,195 soldiers who died at war; their names are etched on a granite stone. At the very end, there is a small inscription that acknowledges that the granite was brought from Bangalore, India. For centuries, we have been content with a raw material mindset. We are happy exporting granite, not designing monuments. We are content making silk and not the robe that would be filled by a beautiful body.
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For your information : Now almost all major IITs have design schools. IIT Guwahati (Department of Design) and IIT Bombay (Industrial Design Centre) has been pioneer in this field for a long time time now.
