AN ERUDITE NATION

We are very erudite people. Indians in general are. Mind you, only some of us even more so.The world is told ad nauseum how in this nation of 1.2 billion people less than one-third can read or write and that even fewer can do those things and add and subtract as well. The population that can read, write, add, subtract, and take the nth root, all at once, must be countable on one finger. But we can all multiply and do that very well too. Division is best left to the British - who specialize in it - and to our politicians. It will be safe to say that those who can do all the above and integrate and differentiate as well is practically zero. I would have said zero, but there is the slight chance that there is that one person somewhere in the darkest corner of Bihar who has made it his life's mission to do all these things simultaneously in some sort of grotesque mathematical multi-tasking.

Such facility with mathematics is grotesque because it is not natural. Consider the fact that many primitive tribes do not have a plural in their primitive languages; they just repeat the word for a mammoth or lion to mean more than one. The problem is, if you kept  repeating "the lion" ten times to indicate having spotted a pride of ten lions, by the time you finished counting you were breakfast for the lions. So the prehistoric people kept it neat and tidy - if you spotted lions you start saying "Lion" and after the second time you winged it faster than your neighbour. What I mean is that notwithstanding some dubious research, we humans are not hardwired for mathematics. In any case not the ones who survived the predators. There are exceptions and Chennai seems to provide most of it.

As part of being erudite we are also a nation of men and women of letters. Literally. Letters that we prefer to affix before and after our names: Dr, Mr, Mrs, BA, MA, MBBS, MBA, Phd, etc singly or in combination as in BA; MA; BEd. Our first President had a Dr affixed infront of his name. So was our second and then our third after which the standards took very precipitous dive. After that one's proximity to G was more important than academic credentials. The G's themselves shunned academic credentials.

Down south standards actually improved. We not only have educated men and women in our political class, but they in addition were Artists, Great Man of Knowledge (this title has so far only been bestowed on one person,  by common consent), Professor, Revolutionary Leader, Captains, Majors, Field Marshals and sometimes hyphenated combinations of two or more of these. These prefixes were in addition to and not in place of BAs. and MAs  which they preferred to affix after their names. Sometimes you had the slightly oxymoronic Dr.So-and-so, BA; MA.

We love to encourage erudition. We do this by starting engineering colleges and Universities at every venue possible and some impossible ones too. If we had the Himalaya ranges running through  the south, they would be festooned with colleges and universities of various types. Naturally they would have titles like "Highest Engineering college"  for men, women and even those in between. Where the average Westerner would prefer to enjoy a ski-slope we would prefer to study inclined planes. Rain shine or snow we pay respect to the goddess of learning. Er, not learning, really, but "diplomas". This last named is actually not accepted in the South. A "diploma" holder is not really in the same league as a "degree" holder. For example if I had a diploma in automotive engineering (in other words a car mechanic), I wouldn't want anyone to know it. A diplomat, on the other hand, especially the eponymously named malted spirit, is much sought after.

We had a few Chief Ministers who were men of letters. The grand old Chanakya of Indian politics authored an accessible interpretation of the Mahabharata. We then had The Great Wise Man and then The Artist, both with MAs after their names and an artist who was universally known by three initials. Some of them  wrote screenplays for movies and the others acted in them. They were all regarded as men of letters because one way or another they had a lot of letters in front of or after their names.

The highest form of expression of an opinion as also of our erudition is a letter to the Editor of The Hindu, our venerable and soporific newspaper. "I shall write a stinker to the Editor of The Hindu" was and still is considered the ultimate threat which made many quake in their boots. The unshod peasantry didn't care one way or another.

The current chief minister continues this fine tradition of erudition founded on our  learning. Except that she  writes "strong" letters to the Prime Minister. On nuclear power stations, dams, fishing, and terrorism.

She has no letters after her name but plenty in front of it..

PETROSEXUALS

Today I learnt a new word: Petrosexual. I have BBC's infantile and scatological presenter Jeremy Clarkson to thank for it. It is obviously a take-off on Metrosexual which itself is a cheap knock-off of Heterosexual. The Metrosexuals I have seen do not appear to be heterosexuals. Being not a hetero helps perhaps. It is not my intention to discuss sexual orientations and their rights and wrongs here. In addition to my belief that such matters are intensely private I do have a healthy fear of the ire of those who are "differently orientated".


Petrosexual. Who is one? Petros used to be called petrol-heads a short while ago. You see Clarkson's infantile pranks may be popular with certain audiences but he  is not the arbiter of English language trends. So petrosexual is really a wannabe neologism yet to find its place under the sun. I have no doubt it one day will. At this moment it is still a wannabe. Who really is a Petro? For the answers we must perhaps get into the etymology of its more established sibling, the Metro.


Wikipedia defines a Metro thus: Metrosexual is a neologism derived from metropolitan and heterosexual coined in 1994 describing a man (especially one living in an urban,post-industrial, capitalist culture) who spends a lot of time and money on shopping for his appearance. Debate surrounds the term's use as a theoretical signifier of sex deconstruction and its associations with consumerism.
Dr Dictionary has nothing to say about them preferring to dwell on Heterosexuals instead. 


If we follow the same train of thought, then there would seem to be a justification for the neologism. Prima facie. There are metropolitan men who are heteros and who get off on owning expensive performance cars and driving them at high speeds. They fit the other requirements too: urban-living, post industrial, capitalist and prone to spending vast sums on fast women and faster cars. I wouldn't want to deconstruct their sexual signifiers,  although it is rumoured that some had theirs reconstructed.

I object to this bias  in favour of men of certain orientation, to the exclusion of those who are differently orientated. I foresee a protest march by the LGBT. 

A petrosexual is to cars what a Metrosexual is to personal grooming. David Beckham was considered the original Metro. Still is. Closer home many failed actors and wannabe page three boys fit that description. It is amazing that although some famously well-groomed men like Anil Ambani were not talked of as Metros. I don't know if he was ever miffed by this omission, but metro or not he can have any girl he wants whenever he wants. Men like him are probably too busy with their business to be full-time Metros. As for Metros being Hetero I dont entirely buy that  description. You wouldn't too, if you have seen anyone officially certified as a metro. I have seen a few officially certified by the arbiter of such things, the venerable Shobha De, and to my eyes they looked as straight as a dog's tail.

A Petro has to be as vain about his car as a Metro is about his looks and grooming. Those cars have to be fast, insanely expensive, totally not-green,  and about as much a family ride as a Saturn V moon rocket. He also has to be someone who knows how to drive such a car and actually revel in driving one. I am not sure that our own indigenous variety of Petros fit the last two requirements: I once caught the scion of a very well-known business family sitting in the ultimate German sports car while his driver drove. He looked very sheepish at being found out and shrugged his shoulder as if to say, "what can I say, its the traffic". He does not qualify as a Petro although he would like to and meets the other requirement concerning fast women.

Unlike Metros, Petros do not have to shave  their chest. 

A TRAIN JOURNEY....

We are justifiably proud of our railways. We have perhaps the longest network if you exclude Russia China and the USA.  As we say we have one of the most extensive railway system (in our version of English "one of the" is always followed by a singular noun) in the world. Unfortunately where we used to have a lot of diversity in the form of different gauges (track widths) now we just have one. Gone is the excitement of starting the journey on one gauge to arrive on another after switching trains somewhere along the way. Gone also is the childish pleasure of seeing a quaint "toy train" of the narrowest gauge and the even greater fun of traveling in one, all hunched and crushed together. Then there was the meter gauge (exactly a meter in width) which was all we had in the South for a while unless you counted a track that sneaked, like a dog that has been caught squarely by a well-aimed young boy's stone, out of Madras and wound its way down to Coimbatore and thence to Cochin. The meter gauge went from left to right, top to bottom and then diagonally for good measure, on a map of peninsular India. My dad, getting on a bit and thus prone to dispensing arcane and at times inane bits of information from his childhood, points out that a meter gauge line ran from Murmugoa (Margaon in modern times) to Machlipatam (the modern day Machlipatnam, or fish town in Telugu), right across the peninsula from west to east, connecting two colonial enclaves- the Portuguese one on the west to the French one on the east with a broad swathe in between of what the Brits preferred to believe was their territory. A resourceful uncle of mine claims to have shipped, when there was some sort of disruption to the Broad Gauge line, trainloads of coal to his factory deep South from the north using only the meter gauge tracks, whose existence was mostly unknown to all except a crafty few.

There was an apocryphal story circulating in the form of an email some time back that the width of the railway track was determined by the width of the rear ends of two horses. Without getting into a discussion how this could have been so or on equine rear ends, suffice it to say that the story has a certain authentic ring to it. History being what it is it is entirely plausible that that's how railway systems evolved. The thing of greater interest isn't so much how railways evolved, as the evolution of rear ends of differing widths of the same genus for, if equine rear ends were what decided the gauge widths, then equine rear ends themselves must have been of differing widths. Not to mention rear ends of horsey women the like of which seem to populate Royal houses especially the English speaking ones. A friend once remarked that a certain British royal had a face like the rear end of a cow but I think he let his dislike of cows overwhelm his better judgement. Whichever animal it was, the likeness of royal faces to animal rear ends is not in dispute. Speaking for myself  I am always reminded of Bombay double-deck buses when I see the face of a certain page 3 personality in Mumbai - and then again I might be doing those sturdy buses an injustice.

A certain gauge is also known as the "Indian Gauge". It is clearly an honour to India that a specific track gauge is named after it. Unfortunately no one else seems to care for it and thus it is in use nowhere else. A pity. It could possibly be the width of the rear-end of a pair of Indian oxen. Now most of our tracks are being converted to this gauge in order to "standardize"  it and increase interoperability (yet another American abomination in which the modern world abounds). Standardizing is not to the "standard gauge" which shall remain confined to some urban transport projects, I understand.

Whichever gauge, whatsoever their origin, whatever the length and direction of journey, all our stations smell the same - of human excrement. Our trains do too. A friend who is now a British citizen has strong views on this saying that when a nation is full of some stuff the latter shows up everywhere. But we have made progress in the matter of railway smells. The purely biological nature of the railway platform smells have been replaced by the combined ones of powerful disinfectants and excrement vying with each other to overpower the other, succeeding only in overwhelming poor travelers such as me. I hanker for the days of steam locomotives when the stations seemed less filthy - is it a trick of the imagination or simply the cleaning power of steam? I remember those locomotives used to belch substantial quantities of steam with almighty roars. Or may be it was that the combined odour of the steam and coal smoke masked the fetid ones.

The train normally arrives covered in what can only be described as dried up remnants of one giant vomit. I cannot for the life of me fathom why anyone would want to get inside something looking so uninviting. There is much jostling shoving and pushing and a general rush to get inside this vomit-covered steel worm.They all must have something important to get to. Once inside things aren't much better except that while the smell of vomit permeates you don't actually see any signs of it. Most of the time. This is all oh so relativistic - I am told that inside worm holes in space you don't notice time. Or mass or distance. Or something. If I was inside a worm I wouldn't want to notice anything. I wouldn't want to be inside any worm at all in the first instance; good job too that I shall be cremated and not buried when I go and thus will not wind up inside any worm..

The insides of our trains look like they have been put together by an army of children with very few tools, even fewer skills and no training at all. It is symbolic of our penchant for the simple life - if something can be done simply and made functional, then why bother with aesthetics? One of the cornerstones of our way of life is the abjuration of anything remotely resembling comfort; for self or for others. We practice it in our trains. As much thought as an amoeba can muster has gone into safety devices too. Spurred no doubt by the results of a previous accident enquiry commission the railways decides to place inside each Air-conditioned coach a hammer with which to break the window glass in order to make one's escape in the event of an accident. Except that then they proceed to screw the lid tight on this hammer. Now you are required to break the glass to get the hammer with which to break the window glass to escape......except some moron forgot to place a hammer inside the little box before sealing it closed. There is however a helpful outline of a hammer painted in red should you wonder what the little glass box is meant for.

Our trains used to be divided into Passenger Trains, Express Trains and Mail Trains. Then there was the Goods Train. You normally didn't want to take the last named unless you are the "Guard" who flagged it on and off with green and red flags which were nearly indistinguishable  from the business end of the train where the driver's spartan office was located. This last named  was definitely not the proverbial corner office, but was warm, spartan black, noisy and offered, if you leaned out dangerously far, sufficient visibility a mile ahead, assuming of course that you  were not myopic. If you were myopic or colour blind you didn't tell anyone about that. Actually it didn't matter. Although it appeared as if the train's movements were controlled by the waving of red and green flags by the "Guard" or at night time by the waving of oil-lit lanterns with red and green lenses, these movements were largely symbolic (not at all shambolic, mind you) and meant for the gawping young boys (girls were generally uninterested in trains except the wedding train). The optimistically named Guard was usually someone too old to drive the train and obviously myopic, with thick eye-glasses. He could hardly guard himself let alone the whole train. But the thing worked on confidence. He acted like he wasn't bothered and generally no-one did bother him. 

The Passenger Trains were meant to carry, well, passengers. They stopped at all stations. They worked on the principle that it is not important when you got to any place so long as you got there. Passengers generally shunned the eponymous trains. Except when it was important to be seen to be making an effort to go some place. Or when they  wished to collect extra daily allowances - the passenger trains were guaranteed to enable you to claim 2 days' worth for a journey that should normally take half a day (usually no allowance for half a day). If passenger trains stopped at all stations, the Express Trains stopped in between the stations and thus the only difference between the two is that lights on the latter worked at night - usually. The express trains also gave their name to a type of coffee, no doubt on account of the copious amounts of steamy noises they made as did the eponymous coffee making machines. The Mail trains carried, well, mail and also important people. The passengers on a Mail train seemed to have a certain je ne sais quoi, and a swagger when they strolled at a wayside station. They looked askance at the passengers on a passenger train and those on an express train. Mail traveled on these trains. So if you wrote a letter and decided to travel to the letter's destination the same day, you would arrive earlier than the letter which kind of defeats the entire purpose of  the mail and mail trains. Some newspapers were named Express and some Mail and the latter mostly concerned themselves with the lives of attractive babes. I am not aware of any named after Passenger trains.

These days mails travel on something called the internet which no one has seen, but which  most people swear by and which appears to work most of the time. Somewhat like God. 

AIRTEL ENTERTAINS.....

When Airtel claim that they provide total entertainment solutions to an individual even they cannot be aware of how comprehensive their entertainment is.
They help you communicate, help you educate yourself through the Net, and entertain yourself through TV. They also help you exercise your vocal chords by shouting at them lest you develop laryngeal atrophy and thus lose your voice. Ditto for your heart - all the running around keeps your heart healthy and young. Dealing with Airtel develops your leg muscles so that you don't become an arthritic vegetable in your dotage. It even keeps digital arthritis away 'cos you are constantly dialing their call centre or typing our mails to their customer service. Is there no end to their generosity?

The simple answer seems to be no. They know the value of laughter. They don't exactly run laughter clubs all over town but do the next best thing - their customer service makes you laugh - Some might say "sardonically" but those would be perpetual pessimists who just can't see good in anything.

Having been an active sort of bloke for a very long time I wasn't sure how retirement is going to treat me and vice versa. My wife understandably entertained a very bleak vision of my days post retirement.

Little did she know. She evidently contended without Airtel which endeavors to entertain you in every possible way. They keep you occupied endless hours trying to get a connection and when you get a connection, trying to keep it active, and when you succeed even in that they keep away your boredom by making you run around to get a bill so that you can pay the bill. They are even so concerned about your health that they make you get off your fat rear end and run around to get a bill copy and then run around some more to pay it. What really beings tears to my eyes is that they place their concern for you ahead of their need to get paid. They would rather keep your feet moving than get their Cashflow moving Isn't there no end their concern for you? I think not.

They are so concerned about your second childhood that they repeat themselves as nauseum for your benefit. They are not in the least irritated nor interested in merely saving their and your time. They make sure you know what you are asking for by making you ask many many times. We all know the aphorism that the first step in getting anything is knowing what you want and Airtel ensures that you know what you want by making you ask for it multiple times. None of this asking once for them. Contrary to what people believe, they - the people, not Airtel- don't know what they want unless they have been made to think about it multiple times. Airtel know what they want - more profits. There is nothing wrong with more profits mind you, unlike what some left leaning looney will have you believe. They are clear about their objectives. They will not be deterred from reaching them.
Even by a looney who wants a bill in order that he may pay it.

COLOURBLIND IN CHENNAI?

The title is for effect, to get your attention.
You see this is about as close I can get to Aldous Huxley as is humanly possible, given the wide gulf between our talents. Having said that, I maintain that my title makes far more sense than his "Eyeless in Gaza". Mine is clear while his is opaque: what exactly does Eyeless mean? Blind? Why blind? And why oh why Gaza of all places? Was his a reference to Gandhi's famous position that "an eye for an eye makes two people blind"? Did he, Huxley, say that in the context of the Palestine conflict? Wikipedia will tell you that Huxley's title was derived from  Milton's Samson Agonistes. Wikipedia must be right.

But I read it long before there was Wikipedia.

I read the book long before I even heard of Timothy Leary, or Carlos Castaneda. In the pre-Leary, pre-Castaneda days only Huxley the dropper of acid, smoker of "mushrooms" and user of peyote and of mescaline could provide me with some justification for trying out some interesting stuff. You see, my dad was a great fan of Thomas Huxley the biologist and thus (hopefully) unlikely to be harsh on the follower of another Huxley. My mum, she was made of sterner stuff. For her anything that did not directly contribute marks on your marksheet was a waste we could ill afford, mind expanding or not. From Huxley's essays  to his novels and thence to his "Doors of Perception", to the music of Jim Morrison of the eponymous band, "The Doors", was but a short distance, a transition quickly and easily made, the exact same thing my mum was concerned about. But transitions were made, stuff smoked, ingested and drunk and mind generally expanded. Expanded until learning much later in life that Castaneda confessed to being a fraud. But I took heart that I wasn't alone in being fooled - he did fool the Stanford University from whence he got his PhD with his fraudulent stories on psychotropics in the Yaqui Indian culture.

But I digress. I meant to dwell upon the role of "colour" in Chennai culture.

Let me categorically assert here that we in Chennai are Colour blind, are not racist, and respect Inuits, Aborigines, Maoris, Yanomamis,  Tuaregs, Berbers, Xhosas, Jarawas and many other tribes irrespective of their colour or creed or tribal affiliations or even origins.We do have a problem with Northerners claiming to be Aryans or vice versa. We positively love the Northern tribes who classify themselves as Dravidians. It is the Aryans that create trouble with their preference for fairer skin. Like that headline in a newspaper which declared a northern actress to be the most desirable woman of 2011. 

Recently the Aryan invasion theory has been questioned on historical basis as well as on the basis of DNA sequencing - the latter held that all Indians share the same DNA and there is very little variation....We suspect it is a mischievous attempt to negate and deny our distinct  evolutionary  and cultural identity.

We do like colour. Our women wear very colourful silk sarees. Some may opine that the colours are gaudy, but gaudiness is in the eye of the beholder. Men however prefer to be clad in white veshtis and white shirts. Stupid northerners call the veshti "lunghi" not realizing that the lunghi is a distinctly different colourful garment stitched in a closed loop whereas the veshti is white and is a long piece of cloth. We like our lunghis too. Men of a certain persuasion tend to wear it more than others and in any case it is an informal  household wear. But they are undoubtedly colourful. Our movies are made in rich saturated colours with the protagonists and women wearing most number of colours possible in any given sequence. You could say that our movies are a riot of colour.

We prefer girls of colour ("ponnu nalla colour" - the girl is of good colour). The birth of a newborn occasions much discussion on its colour - especially a girl child. A baby who has "nalla colour" (good colour) gets a good start in life, is much loved and appreciated. Perhaps because colour can be used to offset the value of dowry somewhat. Our billboards are always colourful as are our political graffiti. The latter though tend to be duochromatic, if you know what I mean.

Colourblind? Far from it. We embrace colour in all its resplendence.
However "women of colour" from South Africa need not apply....

MINISTER RESIGNS OVER TRAFFIC VIOLATION CHARGES

"Are you joking" I hear you ask.
No I am not.
But I did leave out a small detail in the title: That it did not happen in India.
It happened in Britain.

The way I see it, Mr Huhne made a number of mistakes:
1. Joining Mr Cameron's coalition although it apparently had nothing to do with his current predicament.
2. Exceeding speed limits and getting caught. The trick to exceeding speed limits is not getting caught which  Mr.Huhne apparently could not arrange. Like the Chinese motorist caught by a speed camera fiddling with his female passenger's thingamajigs while speeding.
3. Beating the rap for 2 above by making his Greece-born economist wife take the rap.
4. Cheating on his Greece-born wife with his Britain-born secretary and eventually walking out on the former with the latter in tow and thus pissing the former off. You may not give Greeks loans and still get away with it but you don't cheat them. Being expert cheats themselves, especially of taxes, they don't take kindly to being cheated on.
Most importantly,
5. Marrying a Greek.And that too an economist. If someone ever asked you what an oxymoron is, a good example would be "A Greek Economist". The key to successful public life is not marrying a moron, even one with an Oxy. Especially one with some moxie if you plan to have some tail on the side.

Mr Huhne is a text-book definition of a wimp.
In India ministers dont get caught speeding. Or pretty much doing anything else. Ministers dont get caught. Period.
But then our ministers don't marry Greek Economists either.

INDIA'S MOST DESIRABLE WOMAN

I woke up this Saturday morning quite chirpy and chipper only to to be presented with this headline in one of the dailies, admittedly one that prides itself as a business first and then and only then as a newspaper; one whose business model is based on Page 3 trivia. Despite this, the headline offended me. Here it is in full:

Some explanations are necessary for those unfamiliar with Indian Page 3 scene, Bollywood Babes, current Indian popular obsessions and Indian genealogy. The said "BEBO", is no doubt a a distortion of generic infant name turned infant pet name "baby" (very imaginative, that one, isnt it?). This bebo, continuing in the spirit of the parents and the family, is the daughter of a failed Bollywood actress and an actor who failed to make it big in Bollywood despite his family credentials; and is the grand daughter of a very well known Bollywood star and actor whose casting couch was reportedly the gateway to Bollywood career during two or three decades.

Having thus traced the genealogy of the most desirable woman of 2011, I shall proceed to flatly state that the characterization must offend all Indian women. Or at least get them thinking. It certainly got me thinking. 

Since when have we slipped in our aesthetic standards so much that a young woman who looks like her grand father in drag is crowned the most desirable? Or is it that we were always ambivalent about being androgynous and effeminate? Is it in some way an inseparable part of our culture and mental make up, ascribable to the principle of "ardhanari" (half-man-half-woman) in our mythology? Whatever the reason I would argue that men in drag and androgynous females  have both been big hits in the indicators of our popular culture, the movies. They have never failed to titillate the great unwashed multitudes. Most Bollywood movies had a scene or two showing the protagonist  in drags in order to gain access to the girl, although the tendency in today's movies appears to be for the women to drop their clothes and not to be swathed in more. Raj Kapoor has done it, Sanjeev Kumar has done it, even Shahrukh Khan has done it - I do hope I don't get slapped for this last mentioned sacrilege. I doubt if Kabir Bedi has done it although some say he would have made an appealing picture if he had. I personally doubt that.

The tendency to cross-dress seems be an innate characteristic of Indians. Notwithstanding the philosophical underpinnings of the principle of "ardhanari", it is good to keep the two identities separate, in my opinion. The result of such cross-dressing is grotesque and even in movies it was used to elicit some cheap thrills and not to appeal to one's aesthetic sense. If page three had intended it that way, I have nothing further to say on today's headline.

In the land of Apsaras, Rambha, Menaka, Urvashi  and Deepika Padukone I have a problem with a headline that labels as  the most desirable someone who looks like Raj Kapoor in drag. 

THE WOMEN OF CHENNAI

First, a word about the title of this post:
"Madras Madams" would have sounded as if Madras was one vast bordello. Some of my puritanical older relatives - alas, not living any more - thought so, but that's neither here nor there; they would have thought that the pre-apple-and-snake Garden of Eden was one too, man and woman running around with no clothes on, with no consideration for others..."Chennai chicks" sounds far too youthful and promising of certain forwardness and wickedness. Somehow naming the women of Chennai after Gallus Gallus Domesticus seems an injustice to the former - or the latter? I cant decide which. In any case the women of my generation, who in their heydays were referred to as "dames" by their male peers would in all likelihood object to their being named after a bird, albeit domesticated.


But domesticated they, the women, not the chicks, were. Very much so. So much so, the rare "matrimonial" ads seeking suitable bridegrooms for the ladies in question never failed to mention that the girls were "domestic" and "well versed in domestic arts". What constituted these arts was left unsaid; but we young men suspected -nay, hoped - that the repertoire of "domestic arts"  included  what is best described as "conjugal skills" of which we ourselves were unclear but wildly excited. But whatever they were, we hoped, rather salaciously, that the girls in question were good at them. The domestic virtues certainly included, inter alia, respect to elders, getting along with the in-laws, respect for and obedience to the husbands, habit of thrift, ability to sing -usually put to test during Navaratri week - ability to extract from their parents vast quantities of gifts in cash and in kind on sundry occasions all through their lives, faith in and regular observance of religious rites, etc etc. The last named was usually displayed through symbols like kumkum and vibhuti received as prasadam from temples.

I made a reference to the matrimonial ads for young women of marriable age which, by the way, was anything between 18 and 23. Beyond 23, they were not of marriable age, although they may aspire to get married through someone else's cupidity or generosity in accepting a girl so "old". The "matrimonial" route to the married status was not the preferred mode. It was considered the last desperate action of desperate parents when all else had failed to make an alliance, and the only thing worse than that was the girl / woman advertising by herself. Although the adverts openly spoke of the domestic virtues  it was not as if those virtues were given the go-by in a marriage negotiated between the families. Domestication and "virtue" were two non-negotiables in those times. I am afraid most of today's girls / women would fail that test.

This is not an indictment of today's girls; just a statement of facts, such as they are. Today they were jeans, are not afraid to show "what they got", flaunt what they have and make up for what they don't with what Anthony Burgess called the "strapped and elasticated garments with which women sneer delicately at gravity". Today's girls pretty much read what they want to in college, although it is skewed mostly in favour of  Engineering / IT-related stuff in the hopes of finding a job in Cognizant (eat your heart out, Infosys, Cognizant is our preference, here in Chennai) and hopefully a partner for life as well. No more "marriage degrees" as they used to be known in my time which consisted chiefly of  English Litt (the Posh ones) Sociology (the supercilious ones advertising their disdain for job prospects and blind obedience to parents), Psychology (adventurous ones and ones who didnt make it to anything else) and the like. There were a few who stumbled into Physics, Chemistry and (god forbid) Maths. These were considered possessed of such low marriage prospects that their parents didnt bother to even attempt to conceal it. Mind you I am very fond of Mathematical sciences myself despite my palpable lack of success in them, but "hard sciences" were somehow said to make women unsuitable for the life's mission assigned to them which was to get married, raise children and be generally good and god-fearing.

Then Madras changed to Chennai. And many things changed with it. Some of which I have referred to in my other posts. Like names for example. What is most visible is the way the  Madras Mademoiselles have changed to Chennai Chicks. And there is an in-between generation too young to be the former and too old to be the latter. This generation went into government service in large numbers. They too got married, begat children, obeyed their husbands (albeit less readily), co-existed with their in-laws if the latter behaved, etc etc. They have gained significant financial independence. They prefer to work although from the available evidence it appears more for reasons of minimising time spent with the in-laws at home. I use the term "work" very loosely here. Very very very loosely indeed. They go to work - let me re-phrase it: they go their place of work - whenever they can and want to. Government jobs can be quite "flexible".

Somewhere along the way, they have become more assertive, like men. They drive scooters, as badly as the menfolk do. There is a newfound confidence about them. More than confidence; a sort of disdain for the old ways and values. Values like respect for age, for what is "right", honesty and integrity, etc etc. They seem to have become more like men in casting off these values. In Madras if you didnt want to pay a bribe at a government office, you sought out a female employee / superior officer knowing that men were on the take but the women would not demean themselves by expecting asking or receiving gratuities. In Chennai that would not yield the desired results.
An expensive silk saree might.