What comes to your mind at the mention of the word, blouse? The image that conjures up may be of your granny’s staid, starched kind that was essentially a glorified jacket or your mother’s modest kind with a high neckline and straight and mid-length sleeves! In 2022 however, blouses have gotten a serious, much-needed makeover because let’s face it, they totally make or break a sari!

Fashion is something that anyone can buy, but style has to come from within, it’s how you fit into your skin. Come Durga puja, even the simplest lady glows in her own style, even with a tucked red hibiscus on the khopa or casual hair bun. And as if reciprocating with her joy, nature also decks up in her own style. Because with puja, the fire-dance and the alponas — the merry courting of the sharat clouds and the kash phool or Kans grass as it is called in English, ushers the goddess Durga. The goddess has chosen this romantic season to come down to earth from her heavenly abode, filling our hearts with hope, romance, and magic.

All women everywhere are magpies at heart! Give us anything shiny, bright and brilliant and we are sold in a heartbeat! Glitter makes our hearts sing and sequins with all their sparkling glory hits right at the pleasure centres of our brains! For the longest time though sequins and all this shiny have been on the receiving end of relentless flak from naysayers who dismissed it as tacky and inelegant. Anything sequined would be deemed crass and unfashionable, unfit for polite society even where it’d raise many eyebrows and draw inevitable frowns from purists!

A sari is the quintessential fashion statement for any Bengali woman. It’s an emotion so raw and powerful that it is often handed down from one generation to another with love, respect and pride, and the hope that the newer members of the family will see the sari gracefully through her time.

Hindu temples in southern India began turning away devotees wearing western clothes after a court order banning jeans and shorts as "inappropriate" for spiritual worship came into effect.