Debi Mohanty
His mobile refuses to stop beeping. And every time, it rings, Giridhari Barik, 63, has the identical — as if an automated — response, to the person at the other end: “Sir, I am coming in a minute.” Immediately, he rushes on his scooter with a packet carrying freshly stitched kurta pajamas to hand over to the waiting caller.
Delivery done, he returns, with a wide grin, only to repeat the exercise a few minutes later. Barik owns Crown Tailors, located in an obscure bylane of Bhubaneswar’s footwear hub, Ashok Nagar.
Inside the two-room, dingy tailoring unit, Barik (master as he is called) apart, three of his over three decade long associates — Somanath Sahoo (Chhota- Junior-Master), K Ravana and Alladat Khan – are working tirelessly on the overworked, manually run sewing machines. They are unaware of and unperturbed by, either the summer heat, or the loud honking of the passing trains. Their only target is to meet the deadline of their clients: The who’s who of Odisha’s political class.
Though Crown Tailors stitches all kinds of men’s clothing, its USP is the kurta pajama. The dust covered pages of an old notebook in his shop hold body measurements of more than 300 leaders, past and present, who have patronized or are patrons of Barik’s skills. Among the names are Biju Patnaik, J B Patnaik, Hemanand Biswal, Giridhar Gamang (former chief ministers) and Naveen Patnaik, the current CM, besides most BJD legislators. Veterans such as former union ministers Bhakta Charan Das, Kahnu Charan Lenka, Srikanta Jena, the late Congress heavyweight Basant Biswal, leftist leader Sivaji Patnaik are also among them.
This election, more than 60 candidates cutting across party lines have gotten their kurta pajamas stitched at Crown Tailors. Ramesh Chandra Majhi, Pradeep Maharathy, Bishnu Das, Pratap Jena (all from the BJD), the BJP’s Bijoy Mohapatra, Damodar Rout, Prithviraj Harichandan, Jayaram Pangi, Ananta Nayak, Balabhadra Majhi, CPI (M)’s Bhubaneswar Lok Sabha candidate Janardan Pati and the Congress nominees-Tara Prasad Bahinipati, Suresh Kumar Routray, Sarat Rout, Surendra Singh Bhoi, and Chiranjib Biswal are among those who got kurta pajamas stitched at Barik’s shop.
Barik’s clientele is not confined to Odisha. Former Jharkhand chief minister and BJP Lok Sabha nominee for Khunti, Arjun Munda gets a pair of kurta pajamas stitched at Barik’s whenever he visits Bhubaneswar. “Just last month, I had made a couple of pairs for him,” he recalls.
Besides political leaders, he has clothed the likes of spiritual leader and Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and the late Siddha Swami Hardas of Pune.
In an election year, Barik says, he receives orders in three phases. First orders are received, from a lot of candidates, before the campaigning begins. Then, post polls, the elected ones stitch again before entering the Parliament or Assembly. The final phase order comes from a select few — those going to take oath of office as ministers. “Last year, BJD’s Soumya Ranjan Patnaik had stitched a pair just before taking oath in the Rajya Sabha,” Barik says.
Besides tailoring kurta pajamas Barik, too, had flirted with politics. While working as an assistant at a tailor’s shop in Darjeeling, he joined CPI and attended party meetings between 1974 and 1981. But he had to leave politics when the burden of running the family came on his young shoulders. “Politics is my first love,” he says, “I am happy as I am still involved in it, though indirectly.”
Barik’s assistant Somanath, too, had worked an assistant at a tailoring shop in Darjeeling. Crown Tailors was set up in 1982 and the journey since was no cakewalk. A decade and half ago, when fashion trends changed and ready-to-wear clothes invaded the market, many top Tailoring houses had to down shutters. But Barik didn’t. His kurta pajamas and their connoisseurs — politicians — kept his business running.
Barik’s first politician customer came to him by chance. Somanath recalls that one late summer evening the owner of Khadi Niketan (arguably one of Bhubaneswar’s oldest shops dealing in Khadi materials), the late Kailash Chandra Sahoo, called Barik to stitch for a politician. “He appreciated our stitching,” Barik says. The rest, as the idiom goes, is history.