In sartorial disdain, Mahatma has company

In a most interesting revelation on the irrelevance of sartorial choice since a “half-naked Indian fakir” in a shawl and loincloth stunned the world in challenging the might of the then British Empire, a czar of the new tech-driven world seems to have been inspired to drop excessive human dependence on style and fashion. Mark Zuckerberg showed his wardrobe to the world last week as if to suggest where is the style in clothes if man only learns to dercognise it.

The sight of nine identical grey T-shirts hanging alongside seven grey hoodies in his closet was a huge statement on non-style much as the Mahatma’s wife, Kasturba, had said - There is no beauty in the finest cloth – a line still redolent of all the emotions of a very great chapter in the history of the Indian freedom movement led by a man who made his own clothes, or rather, cloth.

Zuckerberg took the pains to explain his somewhat boring clothes-to-office – grey T-shirt or hoodie and jeans - as stemming from his desire not to waste any energy thinking about clothes when far more important matters are at hand in running Facebook-WhatsApp that nearly a third of the world’s population of seven billion is hooked to. He is said to have a soul mate in the world’s most powerful man who also seems to think so too – Barack Obama - whose unvarying suits in just a couple of dull and uninspiring colours also form the most boring fashion non-statement.

While it would be stretching things a bit if we were to conclude that Zuckerberg and Obama have borrowed anything from the minimalism of Gandhi’s sartorial ‘elegance,’ it could at least be imagined that a man they admired so much in history may also have triggered in them this total irreverence towards clothing as fashion as opposed to clothes as a necessity ever since Adam met Eve in paradise or, let us say, Eve met the snake of temptation and bit into the apple.
Speaking of the Mahatma – his memories best brought to light in the immortal Gandhi of Richard Attenborough – we seem to have forgotten once again to honour him as we used to in the old days when the sirens of the police station would blare at 11 am every January 30 and people would stand at attention for two minutes before getting on with their everyday lives. Sadly, this tradition seems to have slipped out of our hands even though the Prime Minister reminded the nation of its 11 am appointment of Saturday, calling as he did for two minutes silence at that hour.

I have never tired of telling the story of how Imran Khan had to remind our nation in the course of a morning session of play on Jan 30, 1980 at the Eden Gardens when he stood still at the top of his run-up at 11 am. The (Indian) umpire kept peeping back to see why he wasn’t running in to bowl, which is when the cricketer told everyone that you pay homage to the Mahatma at that moment each year. The Pakistani players, the Indian batsmen and the umpires followed suit even as the crowd murmured on not quite knowing what that astonishing sight of a sudden halt to the proceedings was all about.

The stand that the US President Obama and the young tech billionaire Zuckerbrg take today on simplifying the choice of clothing in order to free up time to think of more important things to do might just be a tribute to one of the most extraordinary human beings to have graced the Earth. The outstanding scientific thinker of modern civilization, Albert Einstein had said that the world will ‘scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.’ None could have penned a greater tribute.