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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  Letter from... a backpack
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Letter from... a backpack

On the backpack's growing ubiquity in urban India, and the occasional irritant

Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/MintPremium
Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint

In one of his newer advertisements/endorsements, cricketer Virat Kohli steps out of a bus, balancing a bouncing ball on his bat and walks about town—followed by hordes of fans, of course. But the product he is endorsing hangs behind him, his backpack.

Kohli’s choice as a brand ambassador for American Tourister’s backpacks is fairly obvious: he is a youth icon, is trendy and fairly nimble on his feet—which helps on the cricket field and off it, like when running from crazy fans.

It occurred to me the other day—soon after I got smacked on the face with a backpack—that they are everywhere. People who use local trains in Mumbai are usually quite used to being smacked about. Small bruises, torn shirts, scuffed up shoes are all par for course when battling larger battles, like going from Point A to B.

So my surprise was not at getting smacked, but the realization that came after. As I looked around the reasonably crowded train (for the perpetrator of the crime after I had recovered), it appeared that everybody was carrying a backpack.

So while school students, travelers, trekkers have been using them for some time, backpacks have more recently found favour with office goers because they have become cool? There are other reasons too.

For one, they are easy to carry on a bike—you can spot them aplenty in Bengaluru, for example, at every traffic jam, every few inches. The roads are filled with young men on bikes, wearing ties, their office badges on display, in sandals and carrying backpacks. Mumbai, with the number of bikes on the road increasing, is following suit.

Two, backpacks distribute weight equally across your shoulders, so a bag feels lighter and adds less strain on the lower back of the carrier. A photographer friend used to carrying heavy equipment and developed a backache, which he resolved by switching to a backpack some years ago.

Three, as mentioned above with Kohli, they allow you to be nimble—most important when running after the day’s last local train.

Four, they come with many compartments, so a person can carry everything needed to survive for three days in case he can’t go home from work (is known to happen during the monsoons in Mumbai). Gaurav Dublish, co-founder of Wildcraft India, calls it “uncertainty of daily life".

Five, they free up your hands—you can swing them along, hold that cellphone in your hand for whenever you need to change the music, tie your shoelaces without going off balance or hold on to something after you have been pushed by a hurrying passerby.

Finally, they are trendy and make you feel younger. Backpacks were the preserve of the school and college-going youngsters till recently, but now the broad age category has gone up to 45, according to people in the business. A seasoned professional, perhaps, feels sprightly when carrying one—instead of a stodgy briefcase (too old-fashioned) or a sling/man bag (trendy but not as spacious).

The vice-president of sales and marketing at VIP Industries, Sudip Ghose, tells me that it’s no longer “luggage", it’s “travel wear". He says a bag’s like a shirt now, it talks about you and people like to show their personality through their backpacks.

It’s the reason why bag manufacturers are gung-ho about this segment of their business. VIP has 20% of their overall sales coming from backpacks—20-25% of that is bags for professional use. It’s a similar 20% for Samsonite and growing every year. Wildcraft traditionally makes gear for outdoor activity and also backpacks meant for commuters with laptop/gadget compartments, which contribute to two-thirds of their overall backpack sales.

Anushree Tainwala, who is the executive director of marketing of Samsonite South Asia, says our countrymen today are more confident in their approach to travel. They no longer aspire to just visit “safe" travel destinations and this confidence is also reflected in their travel gear choice. “You need to plan for not just the annual trip home or the organized tour group travel or that weekend trip to Lonavala, you need to plan for any kind of journey that life throws at you," she says in an email.

The preferred choice of shade for office goers seems to be black (with a dash of colour, according to Ghose) or definitely something muted—a fluorescent green on the back of an adult male might get a second, somewhat questioning, glance. But that too is apparently going to change. For example, Wildcraft, which makes colourful bags for trekking and camping use, make their office-friendly bags in similar hues. It hasn’t stopped people from buying them; in fact, young people prefer it because it doubles up for a weekend trip.

Backpacks have also made things a lot easier for delivery personnel. Some of the bags used by carriers of goods from Flipkart, Amazon, Delhivery, etc., seem as big as a Mumbai one-bedroom-hall-kitchen flat.

Now, like all things in life, it can’t be all good. A backpack tends to occupy a lot of space—something the residents of Mumbai notice easily because they don’t have much of it to start with. A colleague complained the other day about how people do not take them off in elevators, so they hit someone every time they turn.

At a cinema the same day I got bludgeoned by the bag, the security guard decided to look through all five compartments of my bag—yes, I carry one sometimes—much to the annoyance of the chap behind me, who was getting irritated with the delay.

Then obviously you forget where you have put what—though what you are looking for is usually in the last compartment you open, and if you knew that beforehand, you would have opened that first but then...

You sweat more because it’s on your back, tend to carry more because of the greater room available and are susceptible to someone nicking something from behind your back. But these remain minor problems. Injuries are inevitable on local trains—could very well have been a bruised knee if not a scarred face, as this article in ET Panache notes.

So what does that mean for the future? This is more than a Rs300 crore market, so obviously interest is not going to wane. Ghose talks about making airport-check-point-friendly bags where you don’t have to remove the laptop, and adjustable sleeves to fit gadgets of different sizes.

Wildcraft is focused on technology for improving back support and making Indians less suspicious of top-loading backpacks, making bags that will hug the body, slide less and innovate for versatility. Because a little less than half of all units they sold last year were backpacks. Dublish says there will be no compartmentalization in the future—to borrow from The Lord of the Rings, one bag to rule them all.

Some of Samsonite’s backpacks already come with “built-in tractum suspension strap", with a shoe bag/rain cover or with “RFID-protected compartments to protect from identity and financial theft".

We will continue to be knocked around in trains and elevators—but hopefully the ridiculous backpack challenge has been consigned to history. Maybe our need to carry things will lessen—already, the cell phone combines the qualities of a notebook, calculator, organizer, calendar and flashlight. I can see it getting popular among people who drive on the highways and don’t want to take a 501m detour.

Letter From... is Mint on Sunday’s antidote to boring editor’s columns. Each week, one of our editors—Sidin Vadukut in London and Arun Janardhan in Mumbai—will send dispatches on places, people and institutions that are worth ruminating about on the weekend.

Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com

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Published: 08 Apr 2017, 11:29 PM IST
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