Whenever the issue of a dress code comes up, I always think it would be a wise idea to try it on the girls first. If they comply, the “courageous” boys are likely to follow suit. In Kerala, the Trivandrum Medical College authorities have recently issued a diktat against medical students wearing jeans, leggings, jangling jewellery etc. in classrooms and wards. This dress code brings to mind an incident that occurred in the same medical college in the early 1970s. It was a time when we all had to follow a very strict dress code as medical students.
Boys wore “white and white” meaning both pant and shirt were white, while girls had to wear light-coloured sarees and tie their hair. Even a small bell-bottom was an absolute no-no. Because ragging was in its heydays, first year boys in hostels were allowed only birthday suits. Girls, as always, kept their secrets. The teachers used to take strong action if the dress code was broken. A former principal was known to catch girls by the hair from behind and tie it himself. That was the strictness with which it was enforced back then. It was during those years that one day, a first year girl student came in a pair of blue jeans to the college. All hell broke loose.
This had never happened in the college’s history. The odd pair of “blue legs” was immediately singled out and the girl was summoned by the angry department heads. The whole campus waited in hushed silence. Branded a beatnik, she was asked by the professors to change into a saree immediately in a nearby room. But she didn’t heed their request. Mind you, those were the days when, if a professor decides, you will not pass even the first year exams, let alone MBBS in this life or the next. But she defiantly stood her ground.
Exasperated, the professors took her to the principal. Everyone waited in hushed silence once again. But even before the principal, she stood her ground insisting that she was “decently and comfortably dressed” as per the prospectus, may be much better off than in a half-revealing cumbersome saree. She won her argument and continued to wear jeans till the end of her student days and was a rank holder by the time she passed MBBS. Jeans are not indecent. Whether they are comfortable or not depends on the wearer and not the onlooker. It took a few more years and a few more girls like her for “courageous” boys like us to wear a pair of jeans in the campus. In a tragic twist of fate, the girl who once refused to wear a saree was found dead one day in her room hanging from the ceiling fan by a saree.
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