All hail the nightie: The new Indian national dress.

I'm posting something I recieved via mail and think it's Brilliant!!! Thanks Ludger for sending me this... I would love to know the author and in case any of you do, please let me know. My salute to the author!
Quote:

The dictionary defines the nightie thus: Noun. Nightie (plural nighties) : (informal) A woman’s nightgown or nightdress; a dress-like garment worn to bed.

I was too embarrassed to answer the door in my nightie. Obviously, the entry was not written by an Indian.
Indians are not embarrassed to do ANYTHING in a nightie. They wear them while leaning on the front gate and chatting with the neighour. They show up at the grocery store in them. They think they are perfectly fine as temple wear. They drop their children off to school in them.

The nightie is a great social leveller. (Reuters)

One brave school in Bangalore is now trying to hem the tide. The Blossoms school has issued a dress diktat for parents. No more dropping off your children in your nightwear. Apparently people have started hanging around the school gates every day to get their morning jollies from seeing mommies in their nighties.“It became an embarrassment for everyone around,” principal D. Shashi Kumar told the Telegraph.
As expected, there has been some pushback. “This is too much, to say the least. Setting norms for students is all right in order to maintain decorum, decency and discipline but enforcing conditions on parents is illogical,” fumes H P Murali in the Bangalore Mirror. “We should be concentrating on issues like getting the child to school on time and not what his mum or dad wore while dropping him off,” concurs Dr. Anitha Roseline.
Blossoms obviously does not realise what is at stake here.

In the West, a nightie is a nightgown. When Michael Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace in 1982 by climbing a drainpipe and wandered into the Queen’s bedroom, the real scandal was that he saw the Queen in her nightie. “Her nightie was one of those Liberty prints and it was down to her knees,” he recalled on her 60th anniversary.

In India, the nightie has a new post-colonial reincarnation. When I was growing up my mother changed from her night-sari to her morning sari everyday. That was the way we marked the beginning of the day. Now it feels like the world has entered some kind of twilight zone where all those aunties run around all day with their nighties a-flapping. As samosapedia explains it’s “the most loued article of clothing any aunty owns… From Patiala to Mysore, Indian aunties are louing their nighties.”

I have seen the formidable Mahasweta Devi, one of our foremost intellectuals, now a feisty octogenarian, give television interviews in a sleeveless printed nightie. She was giving vent to her frustrations with the Mamata Banerjee government’s high-handed ways. I could hardly focus on what she was saying. I was too busy trying to figure the pattern on her nightie. Was it flowers? Or was it dots?
Koel Puri asked Sushma Swaraj what she liked to wear when she went for a dip in the Ganga. “I always prefer nightie,” said Sushma-behn.
Can a dress get a better character certificate than that? If it’s good enough for a holy dip in the Ganga, it’s good enough for any occasion.

I have no idea why the Dharmasthala Manjunatha temple in Karnataka is banning the nightie in its code of conduct.Blossoms and the Manjunatha temple have it completely wrong. The sari, which shows off acres of midriff, can provoke impure thoughts in the morning. The salwar kameez can show off too many curves. But the nightie is a class apart. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite monotony. It is chaste, the sati savitri of women’s wear.

As Santosh Desai explains in The Wonderful World of the Indian Nightie “While belonging to the larger family of the negligee, the nightie is an adherent of a different school of thought altogether, being careful to steer clear of anything frilly, lacy, racy or sheer. It is resolute in its modesty and is feminine enough without looking fetching.”
Of course, our fashionistas rail against the nightie as some western import gone horribly wrong,like a noxious weed that’s just taken over our cultural traditions.
On a blog entry entitled Nightie Menace in India, Arjunpuri in Qatar complains:
"I had not even dreamt that one day I would get married into a family, where my own mother-in-law would be wearing a nightie! In spite of knowing that I don’t wear a nightie, my in-laws had purchased a nightie for me and my mother-in-law insisted that I wear it on the very first day after the wedding. When I refused to wear it, she made me to wear it on my churidhar and made my hubby to click my pic in the nightie. Thank god, the picture was completely blurred!
What the nightie-haters don’t realise is that the nightie is actually a triumph of Indian ingenuity.

It is now as Indian as khadi. The Indian woman has taken a piece of clothing and made it completely her own. She has repurposed it and made it fit her own needs and comfort. “Its current popularity has been generated not by any clever marketing but entirely by the user, who has seen in it value not originally intended,” writes Desai. It is women’s liberation– in a bag.

A close relative, a college professor, cannot wait for the moment when she can get home from work and take a shower and change into her nightie. Once she would scurry off to change if an unexpected visitor dropped in. Now she just has various grades of nighties – from good-enough-to-receive-the-courier-in to good-enough-to-meet-her-son’s-classmates.
The nightie has evolved without the help of anyone except for its loyal aam aurat clientele. It’s completely self-made. Sabyasachi would not be caught dead designing it yet there are entire shops in Kolkata’s Gariahat and Bangalore’s Commercial Street that sell nothing but nighties. Kareena Kapoor does not advertise it on television but women still flock to buy it.
No other article of clothing, not even the sari, enjoys such pan-Indian appeal. We truly all live in maxi city now.

Sneer all you want but the humble nightie is the great leveller of classes. The daily help wears one. Her mistress wears one. And there’s not often that much difference between the two nighties. Surely, that’s something to cheer about in a country where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps getting more and more obscene. Sonia’s NAC, take note.
The only thing wrong with a nightie in India is its name. It is not just a nightie. It’s a morningie. It’s an afternoonie. It’s an all-dayie.
Let’s just make it our national dress. It’s earned it.

How I'm responsible for India's performance at the Olympics... :(

I'm very fussy and finicky about my likes and dislikes and am a creature of habit. My physician, tailor, beautician, dentist, baker are those I've been going to for years and I'm very comfortable and change resistant.
Every time I come down to India I go to my favorite saree shop and make a beeline to my tailor.
This blog is a salute to him. He's a wonderful charecter: crabby, irritable, and cantankerous and has a hell of a lot of attitude. He stitches the finest saree blouses ever and I'd heard of him and his disposition and was kinda apprehensive about going to him but his craft amazing enough to brave it.
I went to him for the first time 8 years ago. Mustered courage and timidly went up to him and braced myself for an onslaught based on his reputation. I found this little man with silver bristly hair and intense eyes seated behind a pokey desk. Told him my business, I was the recipient of an intense glare and he said, "I don't come cheap".
As he was measuring me, when it came to my back, I said I'd like the neck of the blouse deeper, he stops abruptly and straightens up and says, "why do you want to wear a blouse at all?"
Next, as he measures my shoulder, he asks me, "are you an athlete?" I said no. "Have you played any sport amatuer or professional?" No again. "so, you didn't have any inclination towards sports?" by now I'm really embarrassed and mumble an almost incoherent no.
That was it, the little man standing in front of me with a measuring tape simply lost it... He drew up to his full height of 5"2 and his eyes glittering with rage he said, "Exactly, because of people like you, India didn't win a gold in the Olympics 2004. Lazy people, you have the physique, what for? No interest in doing anything for the country... ofcourse, the only thing you want to do is to have a good time... it's all your fault, and people ask why India can't win a medal".
If I could, I would have crawled under a sewing machine and hemmed myself in cross stitch. Suitably chastised, I beat a hasty retreat. Over the years, we've struck quite a decent camaraderie and when I went to him day before yesterday, I was shocked to see him, he has shrunk, is almost skeletal, been unwell and told me he's winding up. As always he was heaping abuses at everyone from his doctor to his neighbors and all Indians in general. His ire and passion are still alive, and I enjoy our conversations, his irascibility and his dry as sandpaper wit.
It was sad to see him in this state and I did miss his, "ah, you are the reason we didn't win a medal in the 2012 Olympics.

My Alder tree...

It's 15 years to the day that my Alder was born.
With the prior experience of Amanda being born in 7 months, Alder wanted to do a one-up. I went into labor in 6 months and 2 weeks and my doctor advised that I have take it easy and put me onto medication to settle my 'hyperactive' uterus (ahem!).
It was a scary 2 weeks as we were very apprehensive of an early delivery but the medication seemed to work and I settled into a routine of injections and tablets. My due date was August 3rd and the goal was to somehow sustain till then.
3rd, 4th and comes 5th August. My baby seemed unwilling to take a peek at the world outside, we were told it was a girl and I was waiting for 'Amber' to appear. On the 5th when I went and met the doctor and he advised admission in hospital as the baby was getting big he said and we had to induce labor.
Medication administered at night and we prepared for a late morning or afternoon delivery. 3:05 am and my contractions begin. My mother-in-law spent the night in hospital with me and she predicted that the contractions weren't strong enough and that the torture may well continue into another 24 hours. No, I didn't kill her.
Surprisingly though, the contractions kept coming but not in an unbearably painful fashion and my baby was born at 6:10 am. I was dazed with the pain and the knowledge that it was over before I knew it and the revelation that it was a boy and not a girl who I thought was making an appearance. My first thought was, 'oh shucks, I have to dress him in pink'. I had prepared for a girl with everything in pink.
I didn't get to see him until I was shifted to my room, he was washed, wrapped and handed over to my mother-in-law who wouldn't let go of him. My baby was a 10 pounder and simply beautiful. He fit the cradle exactly because of his sheer size and we had to order a new one to fit him into.
Beginning with his birth, Alder was an easy child to grow.
The name Alder is the common name of a genus of flowering plants (Alnus) belonging to the birch family and is a cousin of the elk and elm trees.
As I was looking up the meaning and description of the tree, I came across this bit of information,"Alder improves the fertility of the soils where it grows, and as a pioneer species, it helps provide additional nitrogen for the successional species which follow".
I cant help smiling and thinking how apt the words are for this precious child of mine. He is a giver and he does provide nutrition to our family and I hope to everyone around him. He is a fine human being and is one of the kindest people I know.
My prayer for him on his 15th is that he grows to be as strong as a tree, for his roots to penetrate deep into the soil which he nourishes as he grows, for his trunk to be sturdy and strong to withstand the ravages of time and the vagaries of nature and for his branches to spread out into the sky and span the earth above and ground below. For him to be a habitat for birds to build nests in and for his shadow to provide shade to every weary soul.
For his timber is strong, his veneer polished and his endurance everlasting... is my faith.

It's raining loss...

Droplets of rain that fall incessantly on my window pane
Break into tiny little beads of misty curtain
An almost flicker of eyelashes acknowledges the dissipation
There is no awareness of moisture on my face
Or maybe the fresh and the salt there have combined and unified
The erosion has begun and the sediments run like rivulets
Searching nooks and crannies to merge into
In the rush to infinity there is an empty space
Void of substance, patience and possession
Unerringly they form a queue to melt into the comforting abyss
Home is the cimmerian soul deliquesce in darkness
Complete is the surrender to the angels of despair
Eroded, disintegated, abraded till there's nothing left to lose.

U.G. Krishnamurthi

U.G Krishnamurti, is described thus in his website, The Essential UG as an enigma--a person who defies all classifications--a philosopher, a Non-guru, guru, call him what you may.

His writing touches a chord deep within me which hums steadily and doesn't shut off easily. Quote below:

"To be yourself is very easy, you don't have to do a thing. No effort is necessary. You don't have to exercise your will, you don't have to do anything to be yourself. But to be something other than what you are, you have to do a lot of things".

"My interest is not to knock off what others have said [that is too easy], but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying."

"When you know nothing, you say a lot. When you know something, there is nothing to say"

Which is why I'm zippin motor mouth up today....

And all of you who know me personally can laugh now..... :D

In the beginning was the Word...

I’m at my parents’ home in Mangalore currently and am bored out of my head… I like to rummage in mum’s cupboards and bureaus. They are a treasure trove of memories. Came across The Holy Bible, presented to my mum in 1967, inscribed thus ‘Translated out of the original tongues and with the former translations diligently compared and revised. Set forth in 1611 and commonly known as the King James Version’
As a child, my first Bible was the King James version but as we grew, we were introduced to the Gideon’s Bible which is very popular now and is most widely and commonly printed. I read the Gideon’s Bible before I sleep everyday now, but I have a vague sense of “I’m missing something”. Actually not so vague… I know exactly what it is… it’s the language of the King James Bible that I miss, the comfort in the cadences of the words, the perfectly symmetrical sentences and the grandeur of verse, the usage of words that are now passé and archaic. It’s poetry pure and simple. I absolutely love the language used in the King James version. At family prayers, my brother and self were made to read the Bible every alternate day and I believe that my romance with the English language began here.
Why do we have to stop using words like ‘thee, whither, wert, thine, wouldst, thou, thy’. We Indians learn many languages and dialects often called as our ‘mother tongue’ and no matter how well we know the Queen’s lingo, we are still foreign speakers of the English language. Many of us transliterate directly from our native speech into English and the Indian English is a potpourri of sentences like, ‘You where went today’ or ‘For me sleep is coming very fast’. These are direct translations of sentences that make perfect sense and are of the right grammatical syntax in our native languages.
There is only one thing I miss when I translate from Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Tulu or any other Indian language that I speak, it’s the respect we give our elders when we address them. You are you, whether you are my father or my son, but in each and every Indian language we have different terms depending on the hierarchical relationship.
The King James Bible gives me that. It feels good to say, ‘How Great Thou Art’ or ‘Have Thine own way Lord, Thou art the potter, I am the clay…’ a sense of satisfaction. Besides it appealing to my thirst for poetry…
‘In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul’ Psalm 94, verse 19.