The manbag dilemma

Many years ago, just before I started attending my new school, there was an oddly weird sense of excitement that I felt, created by the idea of buying my first school bag. I had studied all my life in a boarding school and had never ever had the opportunity of carrying a bag to school, and so I was looking forward to the idea of owning my own backpack. My school bag shopping session was a serious affair. I had studied the type that my cousins were using, tried to recollect all those that I had seen students carry in my previous school, and had tried to come to a conclusion as to what kind I would like. It obviously had to be the coolest backpack, which should look more like a mini trekking backpack rather than the multi-coloured ones that most school children used. Today, 10 years down the line, not only do I still own it, I am also still obsessed with it and use it often. It seems like I have a connection with it and we were quite made for each other. Coming to think of it, I am not the only one obsessed with backpacks, most Indian men have a lifelong connection with them, something that seems a lot stronger than many internet and cellular phone networks in the country. Reason: unknown. While the Indian government in trying its best to do away with the excess load that school children are carrying everyday, Indian men seem to be developing a stronger bond with their backpacks. I guess the government needs to target the fathers of the children first!
Whether they feel that it makes them look super cool and in touch with their younger side or they believe in carrying a heavy load on their backs, the backpack is one of the five things that most men don’t leave home without. It’s a common sight to see men, irrespective of age, shape and size, stuffed into trains and buses, dressed for work and carrying a backpack. Now, there are two things that you should notice about these men. Firstly, they are dressed for work, wearing formal trousers, with shirts neatly tucked in and quite often sporting a tie also. Secondly, most of them work in formal corporate offices, housed in swanky glass buildings. Putting the two together, you just know that this is where the problem arises. Though, these may not be the best dressed men, let’s just face it, office attire and elegant workspaces do not go hand in hand with a backpack. Unless, you’re a techie, a photographer, someone who runs around in the wild trekking, hunting animals, or protecting them from hunters, or a mountaineer, a backpack is something that you should have gifted the security guard of your college on your way out. And if you didn’t do that, keep it in the back of your cupboard for those once in a blue moon trekking trips that you plan to go on. Yes, I do just that with mine. (Confession: on rainy days, I do carry mine to work, to avoid ruining my leather bags!)
Carrying a backpack with your formal wear is one of the fashion blunders that men must avoid, at all costs. Men all over the world have argued that the backpack is comfortable to carry and more manly than the so called ‘man-bags’. And so are engineer boots, cargo pants and polo shirts, but do you ever wear these to work? A bag is one of the few key accessories that complete a man’s wardrobe. What you carry is usually the first thing that gets notices, especially as it can be seen from a distance. Why ruin the elegant, classic, well dressed look that you could achieve by carrying a backpack. In the days of our fathers and grandfathers, when man-bags weren’t so common, and laptops didn’t exist, businessmen carried hard top briefcases to work, with everything in it that they would need to sign a business deal. With the start of the laptop age, men moved on to use backpacks that made it easier to carry the heavy laptops of yesteryears. That was till a few years ago. In the last couple of years, men’s runways have been flooded with all kinds of bags; it could give quite a competition to the women’s bag market. For every bag there is a bigger and better man-bag and for every purse, there is a man-purse. Having finally agreed to give up their backpacks for other options, while men around the world are facing a problem of selecting between a holdall, a messenger, and a man-tote, their Indian counterparts are spared from this dilemma. The reason being, the lack of availability of proper men’s bags in the Indian market. Barring a few brands, most of whom also rarely move beyond a soft briefcase and a messenger bag, shopping for a man-bag is quite a challenge in this country. Many a times I have worn-out my soles and landed up buying a new pair of shoes but not found a proper bag, without having to land up outside the doors of one of the international luxury brands and spending three-fourths, if not all, my monthly salary on a bag. But if you’re looking for a backpack, there are options galore, flooding out from every shop window onto to the streets. Such is the availability of backpacks in the country that if they were edible, starvation and hunger could become a thing of the past. This quite proves the backpack cycle that Indian men are stuck in: there is no dearth of backpacks because Indians believe in keeping their childhood values close to them, but the few who want to break away from those values can’t find proper bags in the country and have to resort to use backpacks. Such is the tragedy in the lives of people like me, who’re longing to break away from the backpack era. Yes, I have been there, done that and now want to move on.