Wearing one’s pride on one’s sleeve is definitely in vogue, and who but our Prime Minister has shown us how it’s done – by wearing a suit with his name for pinstripes. Unfortunately, he drew more grimace than appreciation. College merchandise, like t-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, of course, is a different story altogether; they are about showing pride and affection for one’s alma mater and not about narcissism. But what if my t-shirt asked you to kneel before me because I come from a certain college?
On having discovered some merchandise designed for Lady Shri Ram College for Women being promoted and sold online (albeit by no official LSR Facebook pages), I had to stop and think whether it was pride that the merchandise displayed, or whether it was arrogance. Before long, I realised that it was plain ignorance. And unfortunately, a large section of the clientele of the e-commerce sites, or even Facebook users, might be under the impression that this might be genuine LSR merchandise and this portrays the college in a very bad light, like a fortress of snobbery.
The first such merchandise that cropped up was a sweatshirt by ‘Jack of All Threads’ being marketed by a Facebook page called ‘LSR Graduate Community’, a fairly new page possibly created for the very purpose of marketing the product in question. The sweatshirt tried to make a bold point with the line ‘I graduated from LSR. To save time, let’s assume that I’m always right’. Not surprisingly, it did find a few takers. But better still, it left quite a few graduates disgruntled; proud graduates who insisted that this was not what the college had taught them.
More recently, ‘Freecultr’, an e-retailer, designed a more provocative ‘Kneel before me, I’m from LSR’ t-shirt. The t-shirt did a poor job at wit; even for snob-value, it was a bad job. IIT-Delhi was also given the same tagline. While I cannot comment on what they might have to say about it, I, for one, am very proud of wearing my regular college t-shirt which reads ‘Some leaders are born women’. I am also proud of the new one which has the powerful lines from Maya Angelou’s Phenomenal Woman.
When I wear these t-shirts, I display a certain pride and commitment for my alma mater, and by no means do I expect someone to kneel before me. Because like someone pointed out, we are not taught to belittle the other and assume that we are always right; that would be downright ignorant.
Just like nobody gave Triple Aces the right to decide what a Kudi LSR di looks and behaves like, e-retailers should refrain from deciding who needs to kneel before whom.
