The Outrage Zone: Mahesh Sharma and the Foreigner’s Skirt

On Monday, Dr Mahesh Sharma, the most popular minister among news talk show hosts walked into another controversy when a brochure for foreign tourists roaming around Agra city apparently asked them not to wear skirts. Trying to clear up the controversy, Sharma explained that he was talking about ‘religious places’. 

He told ANI: “When visitors land at the airport, they will be provided with a welcome kit. The kit contains a card, a pamphlet which describes dos and don'ts. Where it will ask the visitors not to travel at night, ask them not to wear skirts. In that kit, there is a pamphlet which says that India is a cultural state where apparels change with respect to religious places like temples and asks the visitors to mind their dress codes.”

To be fair, prima facie it looks like a harmless advisory, and India can’t be totally honest and say “It doesn’t matter what you wear, you are likely to be eve-teased, irrespective of the colour of your skin or whatever you have on’.

(Before anyone starts outraging with #NotAllMen, let me reiterate that every single woman I know have faced different degrees of harassment and eve-teasing and my white Swiss friend who came to Mumbai experienced lewd comments thrice within the first two hours of her arrival). 

Though Mahesh Sharma's comments felt innocuous on the face of it, Twitterati started outraging with marvellous displays of skill and logic.

Dr Sharma, due to his RSS and BJP background, and by virtue of his previous comments which have included ‘Indian girls don’t party’ and ‘Kalam was a great nationalist despite being a Muslim’ was, to borrow a phrase used to shame rape victims, ‘asking for it’.

While one can understand the fears of the OMG: MISOGYNY, HINDUTVA IS COMING FOR OUR SHORT SKIRTS and other asinine logic, one wonders whether it was really worth spending an entire day and wall-to-wall coverage.

 Do we outrage over religious places laying down guidelines? Religion after all works on a set of pre-conceived beliefs, some of which can include covering their head in temple premises or not letting women enter an inner sanctum because they might bend down and display their cleavage which will make men around them turn into savage beasts.

Not that any of this mattered as Twitter went full retard. SHE WHO WAS NEVER NAMED by the Chief Offended Officer compared the ‘ban on skirts’ to the naked Digambar Jain in the Haryana assembly.

Others posted pictures of themselves wearing skirts while Chief Reviewer took a break from apologising to Jains to claim that women had more freedom in ancient times than Modi’s times (He's totally wrong, there's no way Pooja Hegde chose to wear that headset in Mohenjo Daro). 

Some put up pictures of PV Sindhu winning a silver medal at Rio while wearing a skirt, while others compared the 'non-existent ban' to the burkini ban in France and the compulsory hijab in Iran, reaffirming my belief that people simply don’t understand the difference between censoring and censuring. All in all, it was a regular day at the office for media organisations which runs completely on outrage but what occurred to me is perhaps Dr Sharma did this as a favour for a friend.

Saving Vijay Goel? 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must have heard about Vijay Goel’s recent troubles as sports minister where almost everything he says or does has landed him in trouble. But what you probably don’t know is Vijay Goel lost both his parents in the last fortnight and perhaps Dr Sharma was just deflecting some attention to give Goel a break. That’s what a good friend would do anyway!