When your daughter declares you unfit for public viewing: A father's fashion crisis
When your mother, sister, wife, or concubine remonstrates against your slovenliness, you barely take notice. But when your only child — who, just a year ago, thought you were as glamorous as Suga of BTS fame — passes a fatwa on your attending the annual parent-teacher mash-up, you evaluate your sartorial style. As a consolation, I remembered that I had asked the same of my father 40 years ago. In my father's case, it was the opposite. I was afraid he would get his bow tie out once more, like Karan Thapar.
I have held the firm belief that sartorially I could carry anything off. Here, my idol was Saul Bellow, who was said to be always dressed like a tout at the racetracks while giving lectures. My style has been basic, based on comfort and frugality. As a younger son, I wore cast-offs from my father and brother. I certainly knew what Eliot meant when he wrote in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: 'I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.'
In university in the mid-1990s and thereafter, my style was Urban Cowboy meets Miami Vice. I had the check shirt, snap-buttoned, round-neck plaid t-shirt, and Wrangler jeans look down pat. While I had light tan boots, uncomfortable to wear, made for my father by a demented Chinese shoemaker in Calcutta in the late 1970s, I couldn't afford the linen jacket worn by Don Johnson.
In the Delhi winter, I would wear, over this ensemble, a denim jacket or a tweed coat. Sometimes, both at the same time, with a moth-eaten tartan muffler. And over the years, the style hasn't
