“Indian society is a panorama of piles, stacks, bunches, bundles, baskets, bags among which people appear, as laborers, as shopkeepers, as vendors, as housewives, and as pedestrians, making their way through an endless landscape of things, ranging from the most precious to the most ugly and filthy. Things meld into bodies, especially in Indian society, where objects provide the material for people to sleep on, to live in, to rest on, to buy, to sell, to repair, to store, to trade, to scavenge, and to display.”

-Arjun Appadurai, from Nandita Badami’s Thinking Objectively