What Are You Wearing?

In India, I saw people who wore the weirdest clothes. These people must have been insane to go out in public in those threads. Did they think everyone in the world is blind?

Who are these people? They weren't the Indians wearing salwar kameezes, kurtas, or saris. Those are all quite fashionable looks and hey, they've stood the test of time.

No. You can find these monstrocities throughout India, but they tend to congregate in the Paharganj slums of Delhi. It's the clothes that many of the foreigners wear. The worst ones seem to be localized to the Main Bazaar (what I've called the worst street in India). The foreigners there aren't "going native." "Going native" can often be as offensive as the name suggests, but done properly, can be a respectful gesture to a host society.

However, these foreigners aren't "going native." They wear clothes that they think are Indian, not clothes that Indians actually wear. There are sarongs that look like the pants version of that new blanket that comes with sleeves. I saw an older woman wearing a hat that looked like a fez on steroids. In my travels throughout India, I can safely say she was displaying the only one of those in the country. Unless there was another foreinger stupid enough to do so. There were plenty of long-flowing and tight-fitting hippie clothes from the 1960s- not simply stylistically but also, probably, in actuality as well. You could see the most bizarre tattoos. And then there were the dreads. White people with dreads. Old white people with dreads. I wonder if they wore jheri curls in the '80s.

It took every bit of my being not to walk up to these people and just start screaming, "What the fuck are you doing?" And if they mention that their style has something to do with India, I'd have a prepared answer that would involve beating them to death. Gandhi would have wanted it that way. Believe me.