Here’s a café with a difference. Not the usual one which tickles your taste buds with rich aroma of coffee, but a Repair Café that can surely fix your old coffee maker. Yes, the new Repair Café in Bangalore is a unique place which promises to revive the old custom of repair and reuse. It organizes workshops which encourages people to reuse objects instead of dumping them and wasting money on buying new ones.
Started by Antara Mukherji and Purna Sarkar, the Bangalore Repair Café is based on the belief of sustainable living. Antara, a graphic designer and Purna, a human resources professional, followed the footsteps of Martine Postma who started the first Repair Café in The Netherlands in 2009. Today, there are over a thousand Repair Cafés across the world and even Antara and Purna are doing their best to take the concept to places. They both are hosting workshops, getting expert volunteers and raising funds to make the café popular. “In India, we have a tradition of passing on gadgets so that not many things really get dumped. But my generation hardly repairs things – we prefer to throw out things and buy new stuff,” says Antara.
The Repair Café workshops provide a team of expert repair volunteers who are ready to fix your equipment. Electrical kitchen appliances, small household furniture items, jewellery or clothes, you can get almost anything repaired here. While getting your old things repaired, you can also get a knack of some repairing skill. They organize interesting Do-It-Yourself workshops which teach you the art of repair. And if you yourself are a repair expert, you can go and register yourself as a repair volunteer.
The workshop charges a registration fee of Rs 50 for each item. If more items are to be fixed, a nominal prefixed fee is charged. Sometimes you can get lucky to have the services free of cost as many expert volunteers do it for free.
The Repair Café boasts of working towards a clean and green India. The last workshop fixed almost 15 kg of old clothes, electronics, wooden equipment which would otherwise have been discarded to choke the overflowing landfills. It estimates to have helped prevent 6.9 kg of CO2 emissions through the humble art of repairing.
The Café is also a social platform for people to meet, share and learn the skills of repair and reuse. According to Purna, “Repair Cafe is a community event where like-minded people, with an interest in fixing stuff that is broken, can meet others and learn. We are trying to revive the culture of repairing things when they are broken, just as our parents used to do. Give things a second chance, if one can call it that.”
So, next time you wish to get something fixed and simultaneously make friends or try your hand on some repair work, just go to the Repair Café workshop in your city. It will surely be a great experience you’ll cherish.
New Source: The Alternative | Citizen Matters
Image Source: Repaircafe.org
