Witerati: Lolling, longing and Lungi Dance
Recent RWA dress codes smack of moral policing and may spell a death-knell in the capital’s condos for the humble lungi to the naughty nightie
Lungi has had its day out. It may now have a day in.
Lungi has had its fifteen minutes of fame. It now looks to be facing blame.
Lungi is not being looked at too kindly by the citizen police parading by the polite name of residents welfare association, aka RWAs.
The lungi is known to have set the screen on fire. Who can forget the fabled “Lungi Dance” score from the film Chennai Express!
Alas, if the lungi is now itself under fire, blame it on the moral police and citizen police.
Apparently, the lungi got in the bad books, oops bad looks, of an RWA in Greater Noida after some members of the fair sex took umbrage at the gymnastics of geriatric gentry. A greyed specimen of the geriatric gang had, whilst dabbling in yogic asanas, ended up executing a not-so-aesthetic levitation in a lungi.
So much for the lungi being caught on the wrong foot! At least certainly not with its best foot forward. For, it may have revealed a non-picturesque posterior and barely see-able behind.
The curious case of “Lungi Dance” has gone wrong.
Sartorial Snobs
Based on their brazenness or battiness, the RWA citizen constabulary can be categorised thus.
These are the RWAs that with their sartorial snubs and codes of dress contribute to residents’ stress or overdress under duress.
Picture this.
If the ubiquitous lungi got into this particular RWA’s bad books, so did the naughty nightie.
The nightie, the more glam avatar of which may be that other antiquity called maxi, seems to be done with its day out as much as night out.
For, the Noida RWA has also banned the nightie under its newly tailored dress code.
Perhaps, this may trigger the fairer sex to reinvent its night dress. Perhaps, this may spur designers to refashion the naughty nightie.
Perhaps, to fox the moral police, the nightie needs to resemble more a burqa gone down or gallivanting gown. The hooded sort in which stylistas shimmy on red carpets or all over town.
How about nighties with a detachable cloaking trail that shall now narrate the new twist in the tale! And leave snooping condo constabulary grappling to make their head or tail.
The cloak trail could be attached when stepping out to perambulate in the precincts of prudish condominiums. After pottering about under the poking noses of the citizen constabulary in a nightie-turned-gown, the trail could later be detached and dispensed with, for the purposes of unencumbered slumber.
Whilst the fashion fraternity rises to the occasion, to arrest the nightie’s fall from grace, let’s cast a glance at certain other diktats of RWA despots that smack of things bizarre, batty or brazen.
Pet-ulant prudes
These are the RWAs that take the cake, rather bakery, in being pet unfriendly.
Sample this. Another RWA in the NCR had some time back imposed a diktat that pets were to be muzzled before they could potter out or “potty” about on the premises of the condo concerned.
Going to greater lengths of Dilli-ishtyle dadagiri, the RWA’s moral police had decreed that canines could only capriole in the Condo at a distance of three metres from tiny tots.
Single minded dictators
Then there are RWAs that are “single” mindedly autocratic. Their suspicion quotient of singleton tenants scales such heights that they could, in terms of pompous prudishness, sound more stringent than many a convent nun. It puts their moral policing second to none.
The RWA diktats that single tenants shall not be allowed stay-on visitors from the opposite sex could put to shame even our Carmel Convent nuns. The nuns could be excused this, being creatures schooled in suspecting every Tom Dick and Harry, from close-by all-boy schools repeatedly circumnavigating on cycles Carmel compounds, out of “habit”.
The curious case of pun intended and “nun” intended.
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