Sartorial Musings

After much coaxing & cajoling by my mother, I finally decided to clean up my wardrobe. During the process, I unearthed several woven treasures (more or less forgotten) collected during my stay at NITK. Quiz Club members of NITK will remember the club gown which we obtained last year. Well, this is not actually a gown (for me, it is one, definitely) - this is a T-shirt with a collar. Now, that seems to remind me of something. Hmmmm. Ah! Got it. Statements adhering to the format - "This is not [something]...this is [qualified 'something', which is actually 'something' itself but described more accurately!]" - are actually idiomatic expressions popular among the members of this clique called EBGF, short for Eighth Block Ground Floor. Membership is strictly on the basis of the location of one's room - the lucky ones being obviously the residents of the ground floor of the 8^th hostel block. It all started with their T-shirt whose front read "This is not a shirt...", with the back saying "...this is a T-shirt" along with a Microsoft Word Clip Art cartoon of some character getting a brainwave - the one with the bulb lighting up. I suppose the originator chanced upon the idea in a moment of epiphany - "Omigod! This is not a shirt - this, this, this is a T-shirt!!! Of course, why didn't I think of this before? Eureka! Eureka!". One Lifetime Achievement Award here, please. Now where was I? Yeah, the Quiz Club T-shirt - too big, way too big (must be something like XXXXXXL).

I also found the Incident 2002 T-shirt - this one has become unwearable after just 2 to 3 washes - it looks as if it has been used in a 4-way tug of war between unequally matched parties. Now don't take that as a testimony of my washing skills which I have honed to a nicety over the years. The front is pretty decent with a nice photo of the college. But the fundae at the back reduce its wearability drastically. I wonder why they put the 'KRECian philosophy' & the rest of the stuff on a T-shirt which was also supposed to be sold to people from other colleges. The 2003 & 2005 Incident T-shirts are pretty decent, except for their black colour which makes them quite unfit for the hot-n-humid Mangalore weather. I think the Incident 2004 shirt was the worst of the lot. I am grateful to the erstwhile comps CR (Swaroop Joshi) who managed to get refunds of the T-shirt money for the whole class.

Thankfully, I never bought any of the Crrescendo(sic) T-shirts whose designs have been nothing short of atrocious - glaring yellow on dark blue (or was it black?), this year's comical one with the PG biker almost racing the Final Year one and the other years' bikers lagging behind the PG fellow (who are they kidding?) - all this in various gross shades of colours available in the visible spectrum.

The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) T-shirt I got in the International Collegiate Programming Contest at Kanpur was supposed to be of size XL. On wearing it, I found out that it accentuates my biceps very well - need I say more?

For some time, I did toy with the idea of getting rid of some of these garments. But I have this marked disinclination towards disposal of objects having some sentimental value. So, in spite of my carping, they get to stay, as memorabilia, in a corner of my wardrobe at the very bottom of the pile - my emotional baggage in a state of perpetual desuetude.