Addressing the dressing
John is a young chap who is currently single. John rejects casteism, spiritual madness that’s been followed widely in the country and prefers equal rights for the girl in every aspect. However, there are quite a lot of things that he sees or experiences stir this controversial thought.
Incident 1 — Ironical Movie
He watches a movie called ‘Aadai’ wherein the plot revolves around the protagonist who wakes up nude in her old office after being trippy the previous night. How she handles the situation forms the crux of the movie. The movie started with an animated prelude about ‘Nangeli’ who cut off her breasts in an effort to protest against caste-based ‘breast tax’ which hinted the audience including him that the movie is going to talk about the dressing freedom. However, the ending was baffling as the movie ended saying ‘A women’s freedom is limited in every aspect’.
Incident 2 — The TikTok video
He watches a TikTok video that has gone viral. The video has a girl bashing her followers for making comments about the bra strap that was visible in her previous video. She includes kinds of stuff like the cost of the innerwear is 2000 rupees and makes a comparison to male communities reaction when an actress reveals her inner wears. What follows was something that he never imagined. The majority of the male community or MC’s starts mocking her as a slut or characterless in their silly and cheap memes. Consequently, the girl loses her job and faces a huge amount of backlashes from the society which were visible from her numerous Instagram stories. She left the social media handle and sank in without a trace.
Incident 3 — Good for you
He involves in a lazy chit-chat between the cousins which started with discussing her crush and other things, the discussion heats up when the topic is diverted towards dressing. His uncle is concerned about how his sister wears the dress. He wants her to wear loose clothes. John raises a question on why can’t his sister wear what she wants to, his uncle’s answer made a point though not completely agreeable. He answered that “I have no objections in allowing your sister wearing modern/fit dresses. But society is not as good as we think. Though the probability of anything happening wrong is negligible when she comes with me, I don’t want anyone to look at her wrongly consequently making her feel insecure in that particular dress. For the safety of your sister, I want her to wear clothes that are not exposing”.
John queries his female friends as well to get a clear view of what they think about dressing and how would they react if their better half interrupts in their dressing matter. While one of them said I would heed to his wish, the other said I won’t as I know my limit and which is exposing and which is not.
After being through these things, John’s mind is clobbered with ironical thoughts. He was startled by the fact that most of the men who look to be unorthodox and modern working in IT companies have age-old thoughts like women can’t wear what they want to, a women wearing modern dress is a slut and who would even pass comments when a girl wears simplest of modern dresses like torn jeans to the office.
Coming to his personal views, John prefers equal rights for the women in the society in every aspect, there pops up a question how would he react if his future girlfriend or wife wears a modern dress or dress that’s exposing to a certain extent. While the point made by his uncle is undeniable from his point of view, it sacks the freedom of dressing for women in his morality. After speaking tons on freedom of women in social media and arguing a lot on this matter in real life, it will be an uphill task for him to imply the same in his life and be normal while going out with his girlfriend wearing modern dresses as there raises certain things like ‘Tradition’, ‘Decency’,’Fitting with the society’ and similar stuffs that would deny what is actually right.
Basically, a dress is something initially used to protect people from extreme weather conditions. Slowly, it transformed as an integral part of the human being. A good dress does add more confidence to the individual. Speaking so doesn’t restricting a woman from what she wants to wear is a way to suppress her as well her rights. Tradition and custom are what stops the majority from moving towards the change. While following the tradition(like in a few religions) is an appreciable thing, the question raises on why should anyone follow something that could deny his own rights to something. While this could be an intricate topic with immense complexity, there are actually people who follow the tradition or customs only to subdue the pressure from society is an alternative truth that’s mostly left unheard. After evolving through thousands of years, why can’t people loosen up the traditions and accept the change?
