There is every reason to believe that the VP Elect of the US will fashion a new season of political style 

This is not a straightforward start to a piece on Kamala Harris’s clothes and style. What she wears may be among the smallest details of her arrival on the global political stage as the Vice President-elect of the United States.

That is why this circuitous route.

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s 2015 book A Country of First Boys has essays on “the hardened and extreme nature of inequality in India”. Yet Sen offers deeply insightful arguments on what makes India an integral part of world civilization. Astronomically reasoned calendars, the invention of chess, branches of modern mathematics and a lot more that marks India’s multiple contributions to the world, as we know it.

Compelling, the title essay is about the “first boys syndrome”. Boys who did extremely well in the Indian education system that at best can be defined as one big mess. Boys who went on to achieve high positions of power, influence and academic excellence in the West. Boys who had stood first in their class back in India.

Sen’s observations do not directly include Indian mothers who shape the minds of their children with ideas of solidarity, leadership and ambition that has a culturally specific resonance. Yet, it offers the matrix of reasoning for us to do so. Kamala Harris’s victory as the Vice President-elect of the United States may urge us to think about “India as an integral part of global civilization” in more ways in the future. For history to make note. Of the fire in the belly that women, even those who did not secure a full Indian education take with them when they immigrate to other countries in search of a better life. A “first girls syndrome” that Shyamala Gopalan the late mother of Kamala Harris may have been a part of.

The first woman, first political figure of South Asian descent and the first child of an immigrant couple to become the VP Elect of the world’s most powerful (and currently most politically and racially tumultuous) nation had an Indian mother from Thulasendrapuram in Tamil Nadu. A parent who clearly helped Harris shape her ideology as a person, citizen, professional and set her on the path to extraordinary success as an acclaimed attorney and now a position of historical distinction.

That is why we Indians must follow Kamala Harris’s dress and identity, clothes and conversations a lot more carefully. Harris’s white pantsuit—a direct salaam to the women’s suffragette movement now in its 100th  year after some women were given the right to vote with the 19th Amendment to the US constitution passed in 1919—makes her choices as a leader clear. She is a voice for women of all colours. That she wore her suit with a pussy bow white satin blouse (which acquired an added symbolism in the Trump era) underlines the importance Harris gives to clothes for political and personal statements. “All the women who worked to secure and protect the right to vote for over a century: one hundred years ago with the 19th Amendment, 55 years ago with the Voting Rights Act and now, in 2020, with a new generation of women who cast their ballots and continued the fight for their fundamental right to vote and be heard. Tonight, I reflect on their struggle, their determination and the strength of their vision—to see what can be unburdened by what has been—I stand on their shoulders,” said Harris standing tall on her salmon pink kitten heels in her speech on Saturday, November 7. That statement made her white stand out in the dark that American politics has seen in the last few years.