Incredible India: Tasks, Buttons and Fashion Suicides

Many to the few

Going into town yesterday, I once again saw a reaffirmation of my earlier observation of the Indian workforce where there seems to be men for tasks rather than jobs.

I walked into a gentlemen’s outfitters and asked if they had day cravats, an assistant was immediately available and before I knew it, there were 30 cravats laid out before me from the garish to the demure – I tend towards the latter.

Then I wanted matching pocket squares and it became evident that a man’s distinction and discrimination of colour hues is not as developed as that of the female species. We settled for nearness rather than exactness, that was fine by me.

Hand to hand to hand

After I had agreed on what I wanted, we walked up to the cashier; well, I thought it was one cashier but there were two men sat behind the desk.

The first scanned the items and totted up the figures announcing it to his counterpart; I then counted out the money, handed it to the assistant who handed it to the first cashier and this was passed on to the second cashier.

The second cashier first checked the money under the ultra-violet light then counted the money, wrote out a receipt and then counted out the change.

The first cashier having seen that the transaction was completed, gave the assistant a bag in which to carry the goods and there ended my shopping experience in that store.

The division of labour that allows for jobs to be broken into tasks does not make for efficiency whilst it might compensate for the conspiracy of honesty in an impoverished environment.

The snobbery of buttons

I decided to stroll around Connaught Place which is a circular shopping area with the Central Park in the middle. There was a shop that did mostly shirts but when I noticed that the mannequin bedecked in a suit had all the buttons on the jacket done up my tendency to the facetious was too heightened to contemplate stepping in if the pretensions to high fashion left out the minor detail proper fashion sense.

I cannot seem to forget the saying reputedly of the late dressmaker to the Queen, Sir Hardy Amies; “Never trust a man with all his buttons done up.” There are times I have purposefully asked the fully buttoned up to undo the last button but it is an unhealthy snobbish inclination to judge a man by his clothes and to feel less of him by reason of doing up all his buttons; as for those who allow their trousers to sag; if I have much else to say to them, it would be, “Pull up your trousers, young man.”

Fashion victims can be rescued, fashion suicides are beyond salvation – the former can undo their buttons, the latter showing their cack-ridden underwear with their dawdle walk, you can only wonder.