It Wasn’t Mid-Life ‘Madness’ To Wear Shorts But A Choice I Made!

Roaming in your city in shorts doesn’t sound like an achievement and it isn’t one! It’s time to simply stop judging women and their choices!

A day before Women’s Day, my husband was frantically calling my name, while I was dusting the house. He wanted me to drop him at the nearest bus stop and here I was dressed in a loose t-shirt and shorts.

Too bored to change, I decided to drop him in my shorts. Now, this is something I haven’t done after my teenage, especially considering the conservative city that I live in.

I belong to quite a liberal family. My mother-in-law spends a year and a half in Canada and the same amount of time with us. She often brings me short dresses and shorts as gifts. I would tuck them away as my ‘Goa-wale kapade’ (clothes for Goa) and use them in Goa or house parties. And I strictly made sure never to go out in them.

Someone had to change!

My MIL would keep pestering me to try her gifts out and I kept saying, ‘Yeh Canada nahi, Dharwad hai.’ (This isn’t Canada, it’s Dharwad!) She would keep insisting and say, ‘Well, someone has to start the change!’

However, I don’t know what changed now! Does nearing forty make you a little badass? Or was it because feminism was in the air since we were so close to Women’s Day?

If people were watching me – an almost forty-year-old woman riding a two-wheeler in her shorts on the highway, I didn’t care or mind! People who know me here might call it mid-life madness. But hey! They once called it the teenage madness and that of the youth and now it was midlife!

Well, roaming in your city, clad in shorts doesn’t sound like an achievement and it shouldn’t be! Everyone should be able to dress as per their choice in a democratic country. However, women are often judged in small towns and large cities by their families and even close friends for the way they choose to dress. This will take a while to change, but the change has to start with us.

So, once again, I dug out clothes from my ‘Goa-wale kapde’ and pulled out a dress to wear on Women’s Day!

Let’s not let the number of shots we have, the length of our clothes, our relationship status or age define who we are. As women, let’s be unafraid of being exactly who we are!

Picture credits: Still from FilterCopy’s video on YouTube

Namrata Mishra

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