These foreigners! They come to India and like acting like Indians; in their own strange ways. If you go to places like Janpath in Delhi or Church Street in Bangalore or Kamakhya Temple in Guwahati (or any other places where these foreigners throng); you will feel that they all- especially the girls, are born with the sole aim of wearing “Indian” clothes. Also, you will notice that irrespective of caste, creed and nationality, the favourite colour of all these foreign ladies is the “sanyasan” orange. However, this is irrelevant.
Now, if you go to any place in India which is thronged by Indian girls, you will find most of the Indian girls dressed in a desperate attempt to look as these above mentioned foreigners would look in their native places. In fact, now that I think, I have met no girl (including myself) who likes looking like herself. We the girls always know what exactly need to be changed in us (and believe me, it’s always a long list). Some of us wants to grow taller (not possible after a certain age, but this remains in our wish list till we die), some of us want a different eye colour (not possible at any age, but we have the cosmetic lens to help us out), some of us are not happy about our nose (but then, our solace is that Voldemort does not even have a nose; we at least have one to fret about), some of us want a fairer complexion (the sole reason Fair & Lovely sells like hot cake), and so goes on the list. In case you are wondering why losing weight is not a part of the list; let me make it very clear. Losing weight is not a part of any list. For a girl, it’s a part of her life. Period. However, this is irrelevant too.
So, as I was saying, no girl likes looking like herself. Except may be Rekha or Marilyn Monroe. But then, who knows!
Boys, on the other hand, do not much mind how they look. Or so they pretend! But because their clothes have been supremely ignored by the fashion gurus and the fashion houses alike, they do not have much choice. (Let’s not go into the zone of cosmetics; we all loved Shah Rukh Khan in Mohabbatein but we could never forgive him for the shades of lipstick he borrowed from Aishwarya Rai in that movie). So, as I was saying, boys do not have much choice when it comes to clothes. When it comes to exercising their imagination, all the fashion giants have single mindedly exercised it for the benefits of the girls.
And the boys have been stupid at it too, if I must say. I mean, look at the girls. Everywhere they go, they buy clothes. Who would not want to design clothes for them? Who would not want to invest for their clothes? And look at the Indian girls. They grab every opportunity they get to crib about what a hassle a saree is. But have they totally forsaken it? Not at all. Come a marriage in the family and they will forget all their earlier complaints, loosen the string of their purses and spend an obscene load of money to buy the saree of their choice. Complaining about what a nuisance a saree is just the foreplay.
Now look at the boys. They too had some good option in the past: the dhotis and the lungis. Now they are almost a thing of the past. Yes, you can still sometime catch a glimpse of these grabs. We still see the dhoti clumsily clad around a boy when he is getting married or doing some ritual. They will buy the cheapest one available and put it off the moment the priest allows them to. No fun, frolicking and money spent around it. That’s it about the dhotis nowadays. And the lungis, yes! You still see a lot of them if you happen to be in Assam. But they come wrapped around these illegal immigrants and if you ask me, it is not a very pleasant sight to come across.
The point is that girls do not like looking like themselves and they do everything they can to take care of it. The boys too would have surely liked to look like someone else but having no choice, they hide behind the façade of boys being boys.
Now let’s come to the main point. Look around. Most social activists are females. (Or is it that the female activists get better media coverage than their male counterparts?) Also, most of them are feminists. See, it’s easy to be a feminist. And sometime, it is necessary too. We need those kinds. But since there are so many of them and since no man seem upto it, can some female activists please abstain from being a feminist and be a masculinist instead, with specialization in wardrobe management or something to that effect. If not society, history demands it. Otherwise thousand years down the line, while reading about this generation, students will read: Indian females of the 21st century had various options to dress themselves. They wore stuff like jeans, trousers, corduroy, t-shirts, shirts, skirts, shorts, wraps, sarees, kurtis, patiyalas, harem pants, hot pants, dungarees, capris, tube tops, etc, etc. Amongst these, they generously lent their male counterparts the following to wear: jeans, trousers, shirts, t-shirts and shorts. And the males of the society never had the courage to revolt for more; that’s how suppressed they were.
So, hope the point is made. We need some masculinists urgently who can do the noble deed. As I said, let’s do it; if not for society, for history.
