Dress sense and sensibility

A blog in The Wall Street Journal titled "Is Modi India's Best-Dressed Prime Minister Ever?" on the prime minister's much discussed fashion sense has been all the rage in the blogospehere, attracting over 200,000 "likes" on Facebook. But it also said much about the average Modi fan. A poll at the end of the article asking readers to vote on which prime minister was best dressed, attracted 5,360 votes and, no surprise, Modi was the winner with 87 per cent thinking he was the best dressed. Indira Gandhi, whose stunning hand-loom saris wowed crowds whenever she travelled abroad, got just three per cent of the votes, less than her stylish if conservatively dressed father Jawaharlal Nehru (5.7 per cent) and about the same as Atal Bihari Vajpayee (2.8 per cent), whose dress sense was, if anything, forgettable. The biggest surprise was that Manmohan Singh, whose fashion sense can be considered on a par with Vajpayee's, actually attracted some votes - a negligible 44 to be sure, but it is interesting that some voters thought highly enough of his dress sense to vote for him.