Ask the Billi: I Thought I Was Smart and Neat, But My Colleagues Think I’m Downmarket and Dirty

and dignified but that was it. I like to wear nice clothes and shoes, who doesn’t? But in the last couple of months I have slowly started feeling a little not-good looking, not up-to-the-mark. But it’s worse, actually. I was shocked the other day to realise that what I was feeling was dirty. I think in this office I feel like I have not had a bath and my feet are unwashed and everyone knows I have cavities in my teeth. I find myself fighting inside my own mind. It’s a sales job so you have to be well dressed. But I never felt I wasn’t well dressed enough or too ‘country’ to meet my clients. But my team, both boys and girls, I feel like they must be going to a parlour every day. Their toenails are so perfect. There’s never any delay in threading or waxing. They never repeat their clothes. Their shoes are always matching. How many shoes do they have?

I don’t want to spend my time or money so much to become extra fashionable. But I also feel like my confidence is slowly leaking away. Every day I feel less and less like going to work. And this is very depressing too because I really enjoy my job. But the thought of having them just look at me in meetings while I lecture them on the monthly targets makes me feel unsure and tired.

All my seniors are men. They are around 10-15 years older than me. Their wives make sure their shirts are ironed and they wear them. I am guessing they never think about their clothes or anything. And they certainly didn’t bring me to the head office to have this teenage crisis.

What can I do?

—Tired Pants

♣  ♣  ♣

Dear Tired Pants,

I know what you mean about feeling like you are dirty because today, our idea of clean has become to be like people in advertisements. It is not the standard of beauty anymore. It has become the standard of humanity itself and this is a big problem, but not one I can, for all the purrs and pearls of wisdom in the world, really solve, except in so far as I am waiting and doing my bit for the revolution meri jaan.
I will do an irritating thing, however, and tell you about my problems in response to your own, only promising that there is a connection.

When I was very young I hated America. I felt it was the repository of all capitalist evil and was flooding the world with oppressive ideas of gender and race. Then I got a scholarship to go on a study tour there for six months. I would often lecture my colleagues about what was so bad about America. They would listen politely, because Americans are so polite. But they would also say rude things in a via via fashion. Example: My friends don’t want you to bring your friend around because she doesn’t use deodorant. Now, actually no one used deodorant in India those days. I didn’t either. We relied on baths and talcum powder and if we basically stayed clean we were comfortable with everyone’s body having a smell that was their own – we did not find it smelly per se.

No one had ever remarked that I was smelly. But there, in a land of vanilla and coconut air fresheners and sea breeze deodorants, I became obsessed with how I smelled. To be honest, no one ever even looked at me with distaste but I became tense and worried. But since I had taken such a strong position and denounced the racism and classism and anti-humanism of this deodorant business I did not want to concede defeat. I wanted to brave it out as my natural self.

But, I am ashamed to admit, I gave in. One day, in the supermarket I sneaked some deodorant into my basket. Then I began using it sporadically, then regularly. One day, my roommate asked me, “Are you using deodorant? You smell different.” I answered with instant outrage, “Of course not! I would never.”
Today Indians routinely use deodorant and they say the same discriminatory things that Americans said, about poorer, less Americanised Indians and their body smells, and give deodorant to their drivers as if to say ‘Duh, obviously.’ And I constantly feel I contributed in my small way to this turn of events.

But there are many other turns of events – not threading my eyebrows, being lazy about waxing, not going to the gym (which is obviously beneath any billi who has style, darling) and not knowing the latest fashions (also beneath any billi with style, it so happens) which I did not contribute to, where I held out. So I feel guilty, but I don’t over-indulge myself.

The world has become much more obsessed with how people look. And where once people wept with self-hate at not being married by 21, despite help from Anne French, today they spend all their time fitting into an appearances assembly line. The dress of the upwardly mobile ‘modern’ Indian is always Western. Women wear those ridiculous suits to work as if they are in an episode of well, Suits.

Speaking of Suits, are there many women on that show? Isn’t that corporate series all about testosterone? And aren’t women all supposed to look like the appropriate sexy helpmeets of those men? And to show that they are modern, aren’t they supposed to discuss their sex lives ‘openly’ (ha ha ha. Sorry, I always feel like laughing when people say they are ‘open’ about their sex lives, because you can ask the billi the kind of stories people tell her and she won’t tell but she knows, that exterior is, well, often exterior).

So in other words, you work in an office where men and women conform to some idea of you-are-what-you own and the idea of being cool is to talk openly and maybe fakely of your sex life and make sex jokes and maintain a constant air of flirtation. And friendliness begun in a smoke break decides who is cool and who is not. In part this is a very gendered space too, because somehow as a woman you feel (and you are possibly right) that not being extra-fashionable and obsessively pedicured makes you taken less seriously than your male bosses, who are not expected to bother much about their appearance beyond neatness. And that women have to show they are one of the guys by making sex jokes and being girlishly sexy at the same time. The senior men – their authority comes from both their gender and their being in a position of authority. We don’t know if this would change were one of them to dress flamboyantly in a way associated with gay men. But you feel that you are at a disadvantage because of your background, your cultural class and your gender as well as your preference of not seeing appearance as a status symbol.

Except, perhaps you are buying into it more than a little because it is depressing you. You are imagining they look at you as too downmarket and unpedicured, not scrubbed in Dettol and not the type of person who says ‘eww’ to various things which they find ‘gross’, of which, I’m quite sure there is quite a range for these young apparently no-goods in your office.

But analysis and all is okay.  – the point is, what to do, right?

There are many choices – some involve compromise, some involve changing your perspective, some may even involve a little not-so-straightforward… okay never mind, but well, manipulation.

Compromise: If you think dressing a little differently – by which I mean within your own aesthetic and comfort level – would make you feel more confident, then do it. But do it to make yourself feel easy, not to pander to others, because there is no end to the latter road. Will you feel, as I did with the deo, that you have betrayed your own principles? As Obama said (didn’t he?) Yes You Will. But if it helps you to feel more easy to get three new, slightly cool seeming salwar kameezes, then sister, I say do it because the main thing is to feel better and enjoy work again, not to be like Ramakrishna Paramahamsa with the coin under his mattress. No need to get any Brazilian wax and start wearing clothes like people in Ally McBeal, just do what might make you feel yourself but a bit bigger.

Will you keep feeling like it was a defeat of sorts? Well, you might. I still do about that damn deo. But it’s nothing I can’t live with because in a way it helped me get so far ahead – and by that I mean in my head, instead of obsessing about how I might possibly be smelling to someone else. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t give a shit. But in the real world, I pick my battles and there is no shame in that as long as you don’t later start a) believing that’s the absolute right way to be meaning drink the kool-aid, b) discriminating against others on the same count in a very boring repeat of the script-no-one-wants-to-produce-ever called The Oppressed Becomes the Oppressor.

Change your perspective: Remember that you are feeling this way and others may not be looking at you like that. Remember these folks in your office are young and young people like to socialize all the time and are often non-serious and reeling under peer pressure. So see them a bit more kindly. Think how much they are suffering if they would rather go for waxing than sleep extra on Sunday morning, no?

Manipulate: Co-opt a couple of people. Create some checks and balances where they have to be part of the target-setting. Put them on your side. Maybe even rotate those positions. Stop seeing them as the other side, while knowing that in hierarchy there is an element of war and you have to think of them as the other side, but not necessarily the winning one, and not all the time. Once you create some grounds for a professional relationship which is more interactive, you will stop thinking so much about social relationships.

None of these are the magic pill. All this might work – you might feel better and that will start showing and then things might get better in office and you’ll be off and running into a positive cycle. The most you can do is believe in yourself and believe in them and try to create a halfway point to meet at. It’s possible it might not work. It’s possible the people in your office are shallow jerks. It happens. So then, too, you must believe in yourself and know you can get another job, and start looking. A star only needs to find the right night to shine in, after all.