Maids in Leather Pants

At lunch today, I overheard a few women colleagues discussing their maids animatedly. One of them suddenly piped up in a sarcastic tone: "These maids have turned so modern nowadays! I saw my maid on her off day shopping in the local market, wearing jeans, lipstick, and high heels!" As the others on the table went “ooh” and “aah” at the apparently scandalous behaviour, I started thinking.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you are saying: “Arnie and thinking? Is that not a contradiction in terms?” Well, all I have say to that is that just because it is office, that does not mean that I sleep all the time. I do have to wake up sometimes, especially when I am eating. Otherwise there is a tendency to push food into my nose, and that is not really an elegant sight. And when I am awake, and the food is in front of me, I have to think of things other than food. So maid servants are as good or as bad a topic to think of as any other.

Which brings us back to what was I actually thinking about maid servants. No, you filthy minds, I do have not that kind of perverse thoughts about maid servants. Even if those maid servants are cleaner than normal and stylish enough to wear jeans and high heels.

What I was actually thinking is why do people have this tendency to fit everyone else into comfortable stereotypes? What is so wrong in a maid wearing jeans? Or, for that matter, in the maid wearing leather pants and tank tops, if it pleases her? Not only will it be a pleasant change from the coconut hair oiled middle aged sour-mooded specimens that are the norm in Delhi, it is also a striking a blow for equality of the sexes. After all, the guy who comes to wash my car in the mornings and the guy who delivers the newspapers both wear jeans, and no body seems to find that shocking in the least.

So what's so wrong in a maid wearing jeans? Isn't she a human being with her own likings, her own aspirations, and her own young heart which wants to follow the latest that the so-called social superiors claim as their birthright? Especially when the social inferior is in better shape than the scandalized social superior, who, charitably put, resembles a giant pumpkin as she is 5 foot tall and 4 foot broad?