We are sitting in a hugely long, minimally chic reception area of a diagnostic clinic that has just opened in Delhi’s Defence Colony. I am accompanying a good friend who has to undergo a series of medical tests. It is a long wait. The time ticks by slowly during the four hours of wait. Enough time to observe the constant stream of people coming in and going out of the clinic. What else to do but people-watch. Bored, my friend turns to me and says, barely disguising an expression of disgust: “Just look, not a single decent-looking man. What has happened to Indian men?”

She has a point – that morning at least. Tummies fold over and sit like tea cosies over belts. Or protrude from under tired kurtas and not-quite-so shirts. Never mind if the men are young, middle aged or elderly. Most of them waddle, not walk. It is often said that Indians have good facial features. The more kindly disposed would say that these tend to be sharper and better defined than those of many other races. Well, you must admit that most Indian babies tend to have beautifully formed features. But I hasten to add before I am accused of being racist, so do babies of all other races.

No male-bashing
This reminds me of a joke, well half-truth perhaps, that I read somewhere a long time ago. An American woman of probably WASP lineage tells her Greek-American husband of a few years: “You were like a Greek god when I married you. Now you are nothing but a bloody Greek.” Which brings me back to my friend’s despairing question: what has happened to Indian men? Now before you jump to the wrong conclusion and presume that this column is all about male-bashing let me tell you that women come under the scanner as well. But more on that later.

Dutch designer and forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort, recently in Delhi for a luxury conference, made an intriguing comment. Something to ponder over alright. Ms Edelkoort is considered a prophet who susses out trends long before they materialise. Her assessment of Indian men should have them worried; hastily making their way to full length mirrors actually. “Men in this country need urgently to take a sartorial check and that will happen if they become more contemporary. Less macho perhaps.”

Here was the key word – macho. I would certainly qualify the word by prefixing it with faux. The other day in the lobby of a relatively new and exorbitantly expensive hotel that has become the watering hole of the Bold, Beautiful, Young and inevitably, ubiquitously Rich, I saw groups of three or four young men strutting about. Most of them were short and stubby, far, far from godly. Their jeans or pants were so tight that they could barely walk – or appeared to be doing so awkwardly, visibly pulling their stomachs in while pushing their chests out simultaneously.

Certainly, the groups of young men in the hotel that night did remind me of hunters-in-packs. They might have been dressed in what goes for the latest fashion as dictated by Bollywood. Or, Hollywood a couple of times removed. As for older men, in their quest to be with-it, they do not wear their age gracefully: badly dyed hair, clothes befitting much younger men and tense, want-to-be-cool expressions. The style quotient is sorely missing. Style not fashion as many wise men and women have said down the ages makes the man – or woman.

Swagger and thrust
The Dutch designer suggested that the Indian men she saw should become more contemporary. Were the men she saw here caught in a time warp, when the new-age man or metrosexual was not even a glint in the eye? When it was all about swagger and thrust, when the male of the species flaunted his masculinity: peacocks certainly put forth their best feathers to impress the comparatively dowdy peahens.

Indian women on the other hand, especially the younger ones, are generally far better groomed than Indian men. While many men emerging from gyms and beauty parlours have something stud-like about them, the women carry themselves better – certainly less awkwardly and more importantly with far more confidence in western clothes. Increasingly, they carry their lither figures with more grace. However, they, too, are guilty of the more-is-more credo. Bling dominates. Just look around at social events: many women are walking chandeliers.

Presumably, Ms Edelkoort was going beyond the mere sartorial and referring to the macho male attitudes underlying the clothes. I would like to substitute modern for contemporary to talk about our aspirations in a rapidly changing world. As a fairly young nation, one that has not yet definitively yoked off all the coils of colonialism, most of us are still negotiating our modernity. But in making that leap from third world, as we are often described, to the first world, we often falter and end up in nowhere land – like those strutting men. The late English eccentric author and wit Quentin Crisp put it succinctly: “Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.”

Modernity is elsewhere. And it is far from skin deep as our socially mobile, bold face men and women would imagine.

Westoxication
In his perceptive and wonderfully titled book Mistaken Modernity, sociologist Dipankar Gupta tackles the all-important subject of what is modernity for Indians. Is India in truth a modern country? “What is meant by the term modernity...Is it about being technologically acquisitive and inhabiting places that are plush and expensive? Or is it a certain attitude that we bring to bear in our relations with other people?”

The sociologist has borrowed a superb word ‘westoxication’ from Iranian intellectual Jalal-e-Ahmad to describe the fascination of many of India’s social elite with the ‘commodities and fads’ produced in the West. It is a cry from modernity.

MADHU JAIN IS AN AUTHOR AND A JOURNALIST. SHE WRITES FOR SEVERAL PUBLICATIONS AND IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON HER SECOND BOOK. SHE ALSO CURATES ART SHOWS.

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