Thursday, May 10, 2012

'Jeans is not in our Genes'

A state government has directed its employees to desist from wearing jeans and t-shirt at work. The subject line of the circular reportedly read: "To wear decent clothes in office", which virtually means that Jeans and t-shirt are considered indecent! This directive targeted mostly at the government’s field staff wants the ladies to wear sari or salwar-kameez and men to wear pant-shirt. Those who fail to comply have been warned with serious consequences. It is not incidental that most of the field staff are women but what is really surprising is that the ministry and the government department that issued the directive are all headed by women in this case.


The circular reportedly states: "It has been observed that some officers/officials come to office in jeans/T-shirts/Western dresses which sometimes not only look odd but are also in contravention of government rules."

Oh! So the problem is with western dresses, then why not ask men to wear dhoti-kurta or kurta-pyjama instead of pant-shirt. After all pant-shirt did not originate in India! I sometimes wonder which archaic eras are some of us still living in where we ban attire simply because it did not originate in India. Then why use your car, washing machine, fridge, tabs, laptops, mobile phones, computers etc? After all majority of these product-brands that we currently use are not Indian brands!

Besides how blatantly do we encroach upon individual liberty? We shall not let people let decide what they should wear even!

That does not mean I am taking away the appropriateness of attire according to the place or occasion but that’s not the issue. Here, an attire has been prohibited because some people think that it is not decent since it is an western wear. How wise is that?

Poor state government employees! They can’t even voice their grouse because reportedly most of them are contractual staff. May be they took a leaf out of a community banning girls from wearing jeans or using mobile phones, recently!

Whatever…talk about systematic disengagement…do we need a better case?

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