Ankle monitors: Why make Indian students fashion victims?

Maharani Sita Devi of Baroda is reputed to have once dismissed her social rival the Duchess of Windsor's newly-acquired bejewelled choker with the cutting remark, "They used to look nice on my feet" - alluding to the gems' previous setting in a pair of anklets she had sold to the famed New York jeweller Harry Winston.

Smarting from the putdown, the duchess returned the anklet-turned-choker immediately. This week, the off-the-cuff remark by a US official in Hyderabad that ankle monitors are the favoured accessories of the "hip and happening" appears to have once again underlined the oft-quoted belief that nothing ever goes out of fashion.

After all, the American's contention that inebriated movie stars and celebrities have a penchant for radio-tagged ankle cuffs, even if a few sober and clearly untrendy Indian students wrongfooted by shady US universities see them more as an embarrassing impediments, echoes the same difference in perception that the two Indian and British aristocrats displayed over half a century ago.

While the consular official revealed that her well-heeled domestic help also wears anklets (in silver, no less) perhaps she was thinking more on the lines of the 'leg candy' of celebrity bratpackers Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton when describing them as on-trend.

The alternative to the anklet, helpfully revealed by her to be an orange prison jumpsuit, however, is scarcely chic. Besides, they are so 2010 as sartorial trends go, as any fashion guru will testify.

Maybe the authorities should take a cue from the diplomat's original remark (now retracted with apologies) and do a design makeover for those monitors. Cast in platinum, they could well become the next prison-walkway-to-fashion-catwalk craze. But till then, why make Indian students fashion victims?