Faded underpants means bad economy

The other day my wife chided me , ‘ look, your banian has a hole.’

 ‘Where ?’ 

 ‘Behind the neckline.’ 

 I mineswept my back as far as my arms could go. Lo behold ! there at a particular spot I touched a weebit of bare skin.

 ‘Ah ,its too small to really matter’, I protested.

 ‘ Is it written in your communist manifesto that you must wear it till all the strands fall apart ? ‘, she shot back , at her caustic best. 

 

I conceded, Karl Marx never said so. But little did she know that a modern economist, a hundred years after Marx, did distil a great economic truth from men’s underwear worn well past their shelf life. 

 Alan Greenspan. “If you think about all the garments in the household, the garment that is most private is the male underpants. You need clothes on the outside. But the last purchase that you don’t have to make is underpants.” Nobody sees it , why splurge on it ! Only when there’s money still left after all conceivable purchases and all the pizzas and tandoori chickens the tummy could possibly load does one think of replacing underwear. 

 So Alanspan cooked up a Men’s Underwear Index - booming underwear sales meant economy jingalala, drooping sales economy boo-hoo ! So wasn’t my holy (pun intended) baniyan only mirroring the depressed sentiments in our present economy ? TT , the leading hosiery manufacturer, bemoans sales were down 20% in 2019, this year it could only be worse. I too have slipped from my upper middle class status to middle middle class with falling income occasioned by dropping interest rates. No wonder the holes.

 Lest feminists accuse me of being a cheeky male chauvinist, long before Greenspan ‘exposed’ men with Men’s Undearwear Index, MUI , hemlines of women’s skirt too were used to gauge the health of economy. Rising hemlines indicated prosperity, a mini skirt boom ; in times of economic distress hems tended to drop almost overnight. Said the Hemline Index (HI). Not of much relevance today as hemlines move only one way -UP