No Formality Please?

As a well-known advertising tagline reminds us’ Har ghar kuchh kehta hain’. Every home speaks volumes about its residents. The idea of décor in today’s times is all about letting the home speak for oneself. But the carefully curated home, with every piece chosen to bring alive the spirit that animates the dwellers of the home, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In large parts of India even now, and certainly in the past, the home was a place that the self sagged, and body flopped. Into something worn and comfortable. Where rooms came without territorial claims, and space had a fluid quality that could miraculously accommodate many more than what physics would decree.

Travelling across the country, it is common to come across homes that do not believe in dividing space up by function. Barring the showcase, that little space in the drawing rooms devoted to the perfunctory performance of formality made up of curios collected from here and there. The home is an imprint of one’s lived life shorn of any pretensions. You can see refrigerators in the bedroom, have scooters parked in the living room, find large rooms that are nothing more than dumping grounds for accumulated stuff. In this mental model of the home everything is functional and tells a story about the people living there without trying to.

The formal home is built on a sense of self that is acutely self-aware. We are constantly conscious of how we appear to others, and our actions are imbued with a relentless need to come through to others as we like to imagine ourselves. Equally, the sense of individuality of each member of the household has grown to a point where the erstwhile fluidity of the home is insufficient to manage the expectations that individuals have of themselves. Individuals need their personal space, room they call their own.?

The formality extends to many other aspects of our social life. We no longer drop in unannounced on friends and family. The earlier ability to accommodate anyone at the dining table, where impromptu visits always somehow turned into mealtimes, is no longer present, even though many more households have help at home. The shape of our life has become more rigid, its outer boundaries have become more sharply defined. Convenience is now of paramount importance, and we are mindful first of our own, and then of others on whose hospitality we are careful not to impose.

Visiting friends now has an elaborate air of ceremony about it, when viewed from the lens of an earlier time. We need to fix up the visit well in advance, in many sections of society we cannot go empty handed, so flowers, a bottle of wine, some gift for the house, a cooked dish is now seen as?de rigeur. And then of course is the mandatory thank-you text that is sent the day after.?

The marriage invitation is now an Eastman colour production, with invitations from more affluent becoming minor tourist attractions in the neighbourhood. The marriage itself of course is a series of discrete events each with their own themes, menus, and dress codes. The idea of a dress code for a wedding would seem ridiculous given that we wear costumes and not clothes to weddings- there already was a well-established dress code in place.??But that is apparently not enough.?

At one level, it is a loss when we can no longer take each other for granted. Should daughters have to tell parents how they feel about them? Should parents constantly feel the need to reassure their kids that they love them? Should there be a need to celebrate evets like Father’s Day and Mother’s Day? Should friends not be able to land up at each other’s places simply because they feel like doing so?

There is a reason why formality exists in the world. There are occasions where we feel the need to stand outside our raw unfinished selves and don an appearance- one that acknowledges the importance of the context. We dress consciously for an important office meeting, a wedding, we write in an unnaturally officious way when communicating with our superiors, we peak in a language far removed from the everyday when we make a presentation. The formal is a way of affirming the power of the institution, whether it is the workplace, marriage, or a social event.?

The modern rituals that have evolved around relationships have at their heart a deep understanding of how important these relationships are. As the way in which we lead our lives changes, and as work, technology, distances, a growing sense of individuality combine to put pressure on once unselfconscious relationships, the new rituals try and ensure that we continue to communicate more overtly and with greater frequency how we really feel. Like many rituals, often the gesture is an act of tokenism, we do not always feel what we communicate, but this has always been true even otherwise. Relationships of all kinds are built on the bedrock of small hypocrisies.

We express things more formally today because we are anxious that unless we do so, we will lose what it is that we are trying to preserve. Unless friendship is underlined with formal gestures of closeness and gratitude, it is feared that it will not have the strength to sustain itself.?

It is interesting that we think of the modern as a time that does away with the meaningless rituals of the past. But what we have done is to replace one set of rituals with another. The marriage ceremony may have been shortened, but in the name of celebration the rituals of marriage have multiplied. It is common, in North India for people to say, No Formality Please as a way of demonstrating the closeness of a relationship.??It is interesting that we try and communicate the same sense of closeness through acts of formality.??

(This is a version off an article that has appeared previously in the Times of India)