There was a time when women purchased two silk sarees a year and owned a third one, just in case they needed it. There was no concept of a wardrobe and even queens who possesed quite a few sarees kept them in quaint wooden boxes and wooden almirahs. I remember a scene from a tamil film 'Nalla thambi" when the comedian-hero N.S.Krishnan throws open almirah of the princess of a zamin and shows some neatly folded sarees and tells the camera ,'Why should one woman own so many sarees.' I guess a woman from the lower middle class today would have a bigger wardrobe than the one inthe film that had strong communist overtones. And she would sneer at the hero character and look at the 'black and white' film and wonder what colour and texture the sarees were.
Being the boring non consumer of sarees and many other consumable things that i am, I have often been shocked when I had inadvertantly joined other women in their shopping expeditions. Many of them shop for hours and purchase several sarees at a time. But their practised eyes are highly trained in spotting new designs and unique colours from the hundreds arraigned in a shop.
Today clothes define a person. We find it hard to shake off the impression that a person in a suit makes on us.Funny and it shouldn't be so, but it is so, isn't it?
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