The job hasn't been easy, she admits, but it's been worth the trouble, she adds with a smile.

Ms Asma Husaen saw fashion as the best medium to save this tradition and since then there has been no stopping this gritty woman. But studying fashion wasn't the first thing she did. "I was always interested in clothes.

In fact, I was in class 4 when I stitched my first frock, just because the tailor wouldn't stitch as I wanted it. But I never thought of it as a career option, it was only when I was studying medicine that I realised that was not what I wanted to do, so I went back to clothes," she tells you. She came to Delhi and did her fashion designing course from the erstwhile Delhi Institute of Management, at JNU, now the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT).

It was as early as 1987 and no one really thought much of studying fashion and in a small town like Lucknow, she says, it was all the more difficult, with people still being quite conventional. But what was it about Lucknow that she preferred the city to Delhi or Mumbai? "Lucknow is a town which is full of tradition and values, which really need to be kept alive. The kind of embroidery and work that is done here is one of its kind. However, the artists who are doing it no longer want to continue with it because they are underpaid. It's this art and tradition that we have to keep alive. I want to put Lucknow back on the cultural map of India."

The Asma Husaen Institute of Fashion Technology finally came as an answer to her prayers in 1995. The institute, she tells you, is training bright young people who are not only given technical and creative knowledge of related inputs, but also given projects that will upgrade the quality and design inputs of the existing crafts. The institute is a non-profit, non-government organisation. It had plenty of teething troubles, especially in a small town like Lucknow, says Ms Husaen, but it's her love for the town that kept her going, she admits.

Chikan, Kamdani, Zardozi and Jamdani, Ms Husaen says, are rare arts, and need to be kept alive. Using a vivid pattern of colours, Ms Husaen creates garments with a special touch of tradition.