Athena

was flustered about two reports I read in the papers yesterday ( 11 June ) on a similar subject . The news about Kota Baru Municipal Council imposing restriction on what women should wear in recreation parks and the other on the ban on girls wear jeans to college in a state in Uttar Pradesh, India.

I am vexed, but not surprised that the PAS-run state government has gone for women’s clothes, after the slapstick on lipstick and heeled shoes. I laud Wanita MCA Datin Paduka Chew Mei Fun’s plucky statement criticizing this latest attempt to further thwart women’s freedom, or the little they have in the state.

She rightly pointed out that,“ … no one had the right to infringe on the way people dress whether for sports or work and even when resting at home”, and I totally agree.

We being Asians are brought up with the cultural values that define what is decent and what isn’t and going by this we should be given the liberty to be what we are. I am sure an average woman on the street would know when she had infringed on public decency without having the municipal council playing the schoolmaster.

Further from home, if we recall early this year there was an attack on girls at a certain pub in Mangalore, India by some activists and self-proclaimed guardians of religion and culture. Scores of female patrons in the pub were beaten and sexually molested by these champions of morality, a shameful irony.

Also in the news yesterday ( 11 June), we have colleges in Uttar Pradesh enforcing blanket ban on girls wearing jeans to colleges, supposedly as a crackdown on sexual harassment. This is like chopping off the entire hand to treat a cut on a finger.

I fail to understand why is the entire burden of maintaining culture and tradition always on women and not men, mostly in Asian cultures? Women have been an epitome of oppression and exploitation in the name of religion and culture practiced by the conservative male chauvinists and social patriarchs. Will we see any positive digression?

We are in living in cyber world today and we have far more important things to busy ourselves with than to be fussing over women’s clothing in the park and in colleges.

Sadly, save for Chew, the few women we have in power and position have chosen to be silent on this.

BHAVANI KRISHNA IYER
Petaling Jaya

THEY say the best things in life come free. Can freedom be one of them? But of late we are slammed with reprimands time and again that even basic freedom of expression comes not without a cost. I am confused and it has turned into fear and I have downgraded myself to being just an occasional blogger.

Freedom is a bottomless pit and the end is not seen but only imagined; the better your imagination, the better you enjoy this commodity.

Coming to personal freedom, do we realize how much of our net worth as a person is being compromised in the name of dos and don’ts that come dressed up as rules and regulations, at work place for example. In addition to these we also have the codes of conducts and ethics that everybody talks about but nobody is able to clearly define.

A friend who is lucky to be have a plump job complains that her freedom as a person is at stake. Her workplace dictates just about everything for her, from what time she has to hop out of bed, to what she wears to work and how she should conduct herself. This, she considers a severe encroachment into her privacy as person. I was all ears but I thought she was over-reacting.

I know of a friend who has discarded her stilettos for flats so that she could marathon her way to swipe in by 8 am or she is darned. She is also monitored on how many times she leaves the office for pees and poos and whatever else. The toilet happens to be outside and she has to swipe in an out to get to the toilet.

And then there is the most abused term called ‘office-attire’. No this and no that but only those that do not ‘provoke’ and ‘distract' other fellow workers are allowed. I, for one get provoked by attitudes more that clothes and so can we have people wear the right attitude to work?

My friend is distressed and I was careful not to add salt to her wound and so I went along. Yes, it can be troubling every morning when I have to decide on what to wear taking into mighty consideration that I am not a source of provocation and distraction, tough choice it is and a daily ordeal.

Another friend of mine thinks switching jobs is fashionable and she lives in that inflated pride and ego that she is in demand. She was telling me about how she had to subject her entire wardrobe for an overhaul in line with a memo from her new office. No more pants, no more short (even knee length) skirts. “I hated myself for the three years I was there as I appeared in work dressed in what might as well have been a pillow case with holes punched”, she fumed.

While it is recommended that employers should have a code of ethics which would include code of conduct and dressing, there are over-zealous HR personnel who stretch it too far. There are also employers who take complete control of their employers’ lives during office hours and beyond.

We have also come across companies which has clock in and clock out as a yardstick of performance. If you are, for example, 6 minutes late (with allowance of five minutes given as grace time) one is doomed. And you have five late-ins, for example, you will have a show-cause staring at you from your desk. For all anyone cares to know, it could probably be a female employee clocking in late as she had to pacify her wailing two-month baby before leaving for office or she could have been stuck behind a caterpillar making its way to work as well on the so-called highway.

Do we want quality of work output or quantity of time? Both would be ideal but can we have reasonable expectations? We instill fear in people, what we will have is far from commitment.

Can we have moderacy employed in our daily lives so that we can live out life and not merely exist fulfilling the scores of requirements, rules, regulation, blah blah blah. I end with a poem written by a great poet, thinker and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Asia’s first Nobel Laureate

Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been
broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls; ...
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit; ...
Into that heaven of freedom,
my Father, let my country awake.