Blouse Piece

Everyone has a regifting cabinet. And there is an entire genre of goods whose only purpose is to be gifted, and regifted. Metaphorically, they are "blouse pieces"

The blouse piece is not just a material. It is not just a material concept. It is, however, a concept. It signifies (return) gifts that are never used, and are forever in orbit. Like my wife said at a relative’s house this evening, it is “like a dead person whose last rites haven’t been performed, circulating here and there, and never getting to rest”.

Last month, my wife visited one of my aunts. As she was about to leave, the aunt gave her a coconut and a blouse piece. “I’ll take the coconut but I have no use for this blouse piece”, my wife declared. “No no. You don’t need to use it. You can just give it to someone who visits you”, my aunt said as she handed over the blouse piece.

If you think about it, the blouse, as it is currently worn in India with saris, is some hundred and fifty years old. It didn’t really exist before that. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, it has entered “Hindu tradition”. When one lady visits another, it is customary to give a blouse piece as a return gift. And like my aunt told my wife, these blouse pieces are seldom used - they are just passed on.

Abstracting a little bit, I’m pretty sure most people (at least those with children) have a “regifting cabinet” at home. This cabinet contains gifts that you have received, and then carefully unwrapped (as a rule, all gifts ought to be carefully unwrapped, given the high chance that you don’t want to use it), ready to be regifted to someone else. In fact, it is highly likely that most of the gifts that occupy this cabinet have already been regifted at least once.

So this leads to the “blouse piece economy” (again you need to abstract a little) - a large number of companies are in business purely to manufacture stuff that they know will end up as blouse pieces, spending most of their lives in regifting cupboards.

Literal blouse pieces are one such product. Another are “educational toys” (an oxymoron, IMHO) for children - they make for ideal gifting because it appears as if you are gifting something that is beneficial to the recipient child, and signals virtue. In my opinion, the only toys that are educational are ones that have been designed and built purely for entertainment purposes. If I have gifted you or your child an “educational toy”, it is 100% a regift.

Then you have books. When Goodnight stories for rebel girls first came out, it quickly became a popular gift (my daughter received at least two copies). Soon, there were copycats. Now you have tonnes of these “noble-sounding” books that again make for great gifts - it looks good and the recipient isn’t going to bother reading it any way.

Actually this is the fundamental feature of blouse pieces that are not actually blouse pieces - they “look good” (or make the giver look good) while the receiver is highly unlikely to use them, and so the quality doesn’t really matter. Thus, they make for excellent gifts.

(the deal with literal blouse pieces is that they have become such an integral part of the circular economy that nobody cares about quality or looks any more)

If you were to ask an economist about all of this, of course, they would simply tell you that gifts are a dead weight loss on the economy - that your judgment on what I need is necessarily subpar compared to my own judgment on what I need. And so the best gift is cash.

The problem with (literal) blouse pieces is that they are always an accompaniment for cash (even if the accompanying cash is as little as ₹5 - i’m writing this in 2024), and thus can never be a substitute for cash.

PS: In my house, we started using blouse piece in the metaphorical sense after watching this episode of Mindry: