What can be a better message on this Independence Day than one that urges you to go back to India’s roots and embrace the Swadeshi movement? Though many of us have forgotten about this movement, Siddharth Mohan Nair, a law student from Palakkad district, is not ready to give up on Gandhian principles yet.

This young man himself has adopted the Swadeshi principle and is strict follower of that. It is the strong desire to follow this principle that led him to start ‘Desitude’- the complete Khadi jeans store. This final year law student at Madras Law College wants to make traditional clothing attractive to the youth.

“For the past 4 or 5 years, I have been a strict follower of the Gandhian way of living and I only wear Khadi. In Delhi, I was also influenced by the Anna Hazare movement. A strong desire to promote Khadi has been burning inside me from a long time. Normally, when it comes to Khadi, the present generation always says that there is nothing trendy about it and terms it a fabric that the earlier generation wore. I came across a new concept in Khadi called the Denim Khadi. So I thought, Denim is what the youth is attracted to and there is no need to add starch like in traditional Khadi. This is how Desitude was formed. Currently, we are into Khadi jeans and shorts. We are also in the process of making Khadi dungarees, skirts and jackets,” he says.