‘Be presentable and all doors will open to you,’ he had said. For all his hickster behaviour, Chotka dressed impeccably in public. While I never took to sharp dressing – my style of choice over the years can be described more as ‘carefully careless’ – I made up by speaking English to impress. My uncle, a Swedish citizen, who spoke Bengali and Swedish impeccably while his grasp over the English language was highly peccable, wielded the more atavistic weapon: looking respectable.
Appearing respectable is code for looking prosperous. The singular difference between well-to-do and poor people is how they look. But if looks can be deceptive, deceptive dressing can also do what Thomas Piketty cannot: drastically cut down perceptions of inequality.
In 2016, Mocambo, a popular ‘continental’ restaurant on Kolkata’s forever-trendy Park Street, made news when it refused to provide a table to a man and woman because the former looked like a driver (he was the latter’s driver). ‘Wo gandhe kapde mein aa gaya tha’ was the ‘official’ response from Mocambo’s middle management. In more prosperous Delhi or Mumbai, to spot a ‘driver-looking’ driver is tough, unless you’re no bullshit, Sherlock. The Delhi driver is very likely to bear a ‘car-owner look’.
Which is why, for a long time, I have been harbouring what Einstein called a ‘gedankenexperiment’ – thought experiment – where poor people are dressed up in the clothes of well-off people and groomed accordingly. Primping up our neighbourhood phuchkawala to look like a gourmet chef is, indeed, class-appropriation, and by extension class-annihilation, something I presume BR Ambedkar would have thoroughly approved.
So, imagine my joy and surprise when I came across my gedankenexperiment made flesh in an Instagram reel. In a Nov 5 Insta post, Innovation for Change, a Lucknow NGO, showcased youngsters in red saris, lehengas, and kurtas in the style of Kolkata-based haute couture designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee‘s Heritage Bridal 2023 collection. The Innovation for Change reel actually replicates the promotional video of Sabyasachi’s ‘Red is not seasonal, it’s iconic’ line. What stood out for me was that these youngsters, all residents of Lucknow’s Bhawaniganj area and living in shanties (why is the pre-loaded word ‘slums’ used only when pertaining to India?), looked like professional models, code for ‘upper middle-class/rich’. The Insta feed became viral when Sabyasachi himself reposted it with the comment, ‘ And the winner is…’ Earlier this week, I spoke to Harshit Singh, who along with Vishal Kanojia, founded Innovation for Change in 2013. He told me the remarkable story about how some 400 11-18-yr-old Lucknow ‘streetkids’ have found a precious avenue to learn, to play, to create, be skilled… essentially, stay off the street.
Apart from studies, over 3-4 years, they experientially learn life and social skills through workshops that Harshit and Vishal have divided into six categories: performing arts, administrative (apportioning human resources), creative, social media/tech knowhow, management (utilising material objects), craft and decoration.
The ‘Sabyasachi couture’ reel was part of one such Diwali chhutti workshop. Crowdfunded, the kids created the clothes and accessories from donated saris, fabrics and materials, choreographing and shooting the video themselves. ‘This wasn’t even the first time they were inspired by Sabyasachi creations,’ Harshit, a 28-yr-old theatre artist by profession, tells me. ‘Last year, when one of our kids, Khushi, got married, our ‘management’ children recreated Priyanka Chopra’s Sabyasachi bridal lehenga for her.’
The kids in the latest reel look unpoor. What Innovation for Change has been doing over the last nine years goes beyond upping the visibility quotient of ‘street children‘. But to see them in ‘Sabyasachis’, powerfully, effortlessly drives my uncle’s message home: maintaining appearances to known down well-entrenched barriers is not to be scoffed at.
