Permission to wear clothes? No one has the right

The School Education Department last year turned down a request made on behalf of women teachers in Tamil Nadu government schools for permission to wear churidars. “Compulsion to wear saris was not to the liking of women teachers who would desire to wear churidars if given an option since the dress covers their entire body,” the petitioner said. Replying to the representation, the Director of School Education rejected the request on the grounds that dress code being a policy matter of the government, there was no scope to change the norms. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/no-churidars-for-teachers-department/article19512527.ece

Why does the Director of School Education write rules on how teaching staff are supposed to dress? 

Why the hell do women need PERMISSION to wear certain type of clothes? Sometime back, wearing salwar kameez to school landed a teacher in Malda in trouble. The managing committee members of Aiho Girls' School in Malda lodged a complaint against her for arguing with them and not agreeing to wear a sari to school. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Teacher-hauled-up-for-wearing-salwar-kameez/articleshow/13016038.cms

A school management should value someone's right to wear something comfortable to them. If sari will be imposed on women, then dhoti should be imposed on men. A teacher shouldn't be judged based on what she wears. Anything decent and modest can be worn. 

Indian women somehow always seem to be forced to wear sarees wherever they go. Many women come under a certain dress code once they reach a certain age. This is prevalent in most of the places, including major cities, where once women are married, bindi, chain, bangles and tied up hair are a must to make sure they are acceptable to the 'society'. But nobody has the right to force someone to wear certain type of clothes. Clothing is a part of human rights that entitles someone to wear an attire of their choice. Why are women being permitted to wear a sari? Shouldn't it be okay to wear any formal attire at our places of work? 

Even a God in south India wasn't allowed to wear salwar kameez in Mayiladuthurai’s Mayuranathaswami temple. The temple priest was removed from duty as he adorned the deity with sandalwood paste (sandhanakaapu) but going against the traditional saree, the goddess was dressed in salwar-kameez-dupatta. Some devotees were upset that the 'sanctity' of the 1000-year-old idol has been tarnished because of the display.  The decision to expel was expedited by the Thiruvadheenam Aadheenam (Mutt) that also has about 27 other temples under its administrative control in Tamil Nadu. It is, however, not uncommon for temple priests to get creative with such decors.  https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/dress-code-goddess-tn-priest-sacked-dressing-idol-salwar-kameez-75930

India is making progress in every field. We've been moving towards a considerable amount of change. Technology has improved to be more and more personalized. There is not a single thing that we do without electricity-powered devices. It is 2018 and we still continue to impose a strict dress code on teachers!  Fashion industry has evolved so much with what can be worn and even couture now has ready to wear stuff off the ramp rather than playing their way with fabrics. But why are we still following the 2nd century garb of a garment that has to be spun around a human like a mummy being wrapped and pull one part of it over the torso, just to cover a small portion of the front and not the back? It takes atleast half-an-hour to get ready in a sari. Do we have time to dress ourselves just to please some school management that comprises of men who wear pants and shirts? Somehow men moved to pants and shirts, and they continue to wear it ever since Britishers came and left this country. If sari is a dress code for female teachers, then men must wear veshti with a man-bun like it used to be before! 

If a teacher doesn't wear a sari, does it mean she is naked? Why this sexism? Teachers aren't born to please the management's eyes. Even my perverted stalker demanded me in a vulgar way to wear a sari. India is a country where even 60 to 90-year-old women wear pants and shirts, but the majority of the mindsets are the ones who are surprised when they see a married woman wearing pants and shirts. Women who wear the so-called Western clothes are still seen as an odd-man-out in many areas in this country (maybe not in metro cities). Will this country ever develop or adapt to the ever-changing reality? Private institutions shouldn't impose such a rule. There are still some colleges who insist on strict dress codes. The college where I did my undergraduate course, insisted that teachers cannot step into the campus in anything other than a sari. 

Some Indians do tend to show off their 'traditional' side once in a blue moon for a wedding, where all one has to do it sit on a chair and eat! But wearing a sari, can you catch that train that you'd miss dearly? Can you run to catch a guy who just snatched your chain? Can you walk without the top part being swept off by wind? Can you get on a bus without one portion being pulled away? Can you even ride a bike? Sorry, not sari. 

It is only easy to show off skin with it, that's why even Kareena Kapoor wears it when she tries to dance some hip-hop among men whose faces go right to her hip, they may be waiting for a slip. Not just item numbers, almost all romantic songs have the lady in a sari. In Main Hoon Na, Sushmita Sen wears a thin sari to teach in this college where Shah Rukh Khan's movie character falls for her; it was done for the sake of bringing glamour to the movie. What other attire would be more attractive, some ask. The hero and heroine romance in snowy area with the hero in a beautiful leather jacket and the heroine..well.. In her sleeveless sari blouse. I wonder how they managed to do a dance routine in that freezing cold! When I went to Himachal, I couldn't even take my gloves off in room!

Shah Rukh Khan's yet another character Rahul lusted for Kajol's character Anjali only when she wore a sari in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Indian cinema would've been saved if she didn't wear that piece of garment and continued to wear pants instead. Pants were invented for women at first. But somehow it became a norm for men, who used to wear dhotis, but women are expected to continue wearing saris.

There are high chances of wardrobe malfunction if a person suddenly starts to wear it. And none of the women till their 20s even know the whole point of wearing such an age-old garb. It is a sexy piece of clothing that teachers can do without. Not only that, in some movies where there's a 'sexy' character that is shown as a men-magnet, the most common thing we see? Her in a chiffon translucent sari and a sleeveless blouse, and atleast one instance where she drops something and bends over to take it, in a revealing way. 

Modern is a word that would denote only a female's attire. Men in India can wear jeans and T-shirts till their deathbeds and they'll still be called sanskari, but a woman must stop doing so once she is married, since salwars somehow got accepted as the best piece of clothing by Indians. Workplaces and other institutions should refrain from making their employees follow a certain dress code. Anything decent should be acceptable since no sensible woman would wear something indecent. The 'society' that criticizes people's attire is mostly made up by women, who in turn restrict their children, i.e. daughters and daughters-in-law to either wear saris or salwars, and to keep away from T-shirts or shirts, and definitely a strict no to trousers or skirts. Abolishing certain type of clothes is mostly seen among people living in certain under-developed areas where conservative methods are seen as the only way to live and anything apart from what their ancestors taught is totally ignored. Families too shouldn't impose such harsh rules, since wearing clothes – or more accurately, choosing which clothes to wear – is, for many people, an important part of right to freedom of expression as confirmed under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

Nobody would like to be told what to eat or how to dress, the Supreme Court said on August 24 while ruling that these activities come under the realm of right to privacy. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/no-one-likes-to-be-told-what-to-eat-how-to-dress-sc/article19554712.ece India’s tourism minister Mahesh Sharma said in 2016 that foreign women should not wear skirts “for their own safety”. https://www.indiatvnews.com/politics/national-don-t-wear-skirts-or-go-out-at-night-culture-minister-s-advise-to-foreign-women-tourists-345719 

Be it small towns or cities, the Indian mindset is set in traditional clothing, and by traditional clothing, it mostly means salwars these days, as the concept of sari draping is dying amongst youth, the youth that make up most of India. If one wants to wear a sari, then it should be okay. But if the teachers in Malda or Tamil Nadu didn't want to, even then it should be okay. They weren't asking to wear T-shirts and capris to school.

What is freedom when tax payers cannot wear something that they want to? India is a developing country where development has come out in infrastructure, but not in clothing. Imagine a female astronaut on the Moon wearing a sari with flowers on her hair and oh, her head has to be covered because she is married!