India and Austria

Available for over a year

Stories from India and Austria, presented by Pascale Harter. There are some countries where, when your radio or watch is broken, you throw it away and get a new one. There's no one to fix it, even if you wanted to. And then there are other countries where broken things have a hundred incarnations before being harvested for any useful parts. India is considered to have a particular talent for improvising in this way. Craig Jeffrey has been talking to students in Uttar Pradesh who feel that this talent for fixing and making do, called 'jugaad' in Hindi, is a mixed blessing. In Austria, wearing traditional clothes known as Tracht used to mark a person out as conservative, even politically far-right. But now these national costumes - lederhosen for men and dirndl dresses for women - have recently become rather fashionable. Despite living in Vienna for a decade, Bethany Bell has just recently tried on a dirndl for the first time – so will she go for the apron? (Image: Two young women wearing traditional Dirndl dresses. Credit: AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)