PERSONAL / ATTIRE SPECIAL.... The awkwardness of the Indian tie

 The awkwardness of the Indian tie

    The necktie in India is, in all probability, a tortured soul. Found most often either dangling decrepitly on a schoolboy’s neck or shuffling awkwardly on the bobbing Adam’s apple of a pharmaceutical sales executive, the tie has ended up far from its somewhat loftier origins. It is true that in the rest of the world too, it has come under challenge and undergone some creative reinterpretation as the codes of clothing have evolved to mirror new social realities. If earlier it was a mark of belonging to a privileged club, a sign that one was a valued member of that part of society that made the rules and lived in exaggerated deference to them, today, it lives a more complex existence. The absence of the tie is a powerful sign today, with new professions marking their distance from the old by publicly discarding the necktie. Simultaneously, as the needs of identity become more playful and multiple, the tie is being reinvented in a more casual form to add a touch of enigmatic flourish to one’s persona.
    In India, there is a small section where the tie is evolving similarly, but for a large part of heartland India, the tie is an object that produces more than a little puzzlement. Its meaning is not quite clear, and its lack of obvious function makes it apparent that it has some symbolic value, but it is uncertain as to what precisely that might be. Most often, the tie in the Indian context is a flag of incomprehension that billows in the stiff breeze of Someone Else’s Rules. Other modes of western wear are easier to adopt, for they have some visible reason for existence. One can fathom the need for a shirt and a pair of trousers, and even a belt has good reason to exist given the slippery fullness of Indian paunches. Socks struggle a bit, for their battle against gravity is one that seems heroic but fruitless, but even
they have a role that is possible to understand. The tie, on the other hand, is not quite as self-explanatory in its function, and given that its primary role seems to lie in the grey area between imprisoning the throat and throttling it, is decoded as a sign of powerlessness.
    It doesn’t help that learning to knot a tie is a skill that surpasses the difficulty of eating with a knife and fork, and seems even more pointless. It calls for a high degree of motor skills, and trying to knot a tie on one’s own while looking at a mirror is the kind of the thing that is guaranteed to make one feel utterly inadequate. Wearing a tie is an act of becoming someone else with the foreknowledge that one will fail in one’s attempt.
    As part of a school uniform, the tie is part of the mysterious set of rules that are meant to be followed without question. Of course, schoolchildren have the great ability to puncture the pretensions of a tie, by wearing it as if it were a piece of rope. Schools use the necktie as an instrument to shimmy up the class ladder, but in doing so, end up advertising the futility of the quest. Without a meaningful function, and adrift of the cultural reference points that lend it meaning, the tie in a school uniform is more a derisive hoot than a humble application for inclusion into a higher class. The idea that a garment could alter the enormous asymmetry that exists between people born in vastly different circumstances, is exposed for the patronizing fantasy that it is. The tie is so far away from the reality of its wearer, that instead of serving as a symbol, it becomes a slightly tasteless joke, better ignored than acknowledged.
    When a schoolboy’s tie grows up, it becomes a sales executive’s neckwear. On a sales executive, the tie is an admission of submission, of the acceptance by an individual of the power of a dominant collective to which obeisance must be paid in order to gain entry. It is a confession of one’s inherent inability to belong to an exalted group, and needing the help of external props that convey one’s willingness to play the game by the rules. There is no pride’s in a salesman’s tie; it is either an entreaty or a slightly resentful curbing of a natural instinct that is put on display. Ties are worn on the sales cadre, not by them.
    The tie is part of the new hierarchies that have sprung up in India, in addition to the many that have existed for a long time. Other garments, too, play a role in fixing one’s place in this new world, but most offer room for manoeuvre. The standard western attire of pant-shirt too performs the role of acknowledging that one is part of a structure; it signals a loose membership with a cadre of people working within organized systems. It is a smock of anonymity worn voluntary, allowing belonging and escape. By becoming part of a grey collective, the individual eludes attention, letting him create an island of invisibility around him. But the tie gives no such relief; it marks an individual out as someone who is knocking on belonging’s door. Which is why the small-town businessman makes a point of never wearing a tie, except at his own wedding, which he may see as a sign of confinement and servitude. Even the shirt is not tucked into the trousers, as it is seen as a mark of conformity. For all its lack of heroism, the tie serves a a pragmatic purpose. Perhaps its arbitrariness is its reason for being. It is a warning that we inhabit a world we are doomed never to fully understand. The tie tells us, in the real world, learning is not necessarily about understanding things but getting used to them.
 Santosh Desai TOI130701