Saying it right

The other day, i saw my Bangalore neighbour wearing a flaming-red T-shirt with a message across the chest saying 'Born Free — But Taxed To Death'. And i realised that Marshall McLuhan's oft-quoted observation that "The medium is the message" was far too general for this day and age. Today, almost 50 years after it was first propounded, McLuhan's original statement that the medium influences how the message is perceived could, i feel, be more specifically changed to "The T-shirt is the message".
A few days later, when i was strolling through one of Bangalore's upmarket colonies, the wisdom of adapting the McLuhan observation was further driven home when i spotted a nubile lass sporting a pink T-shirt with a message saying "Don't let your eyes wander here". Since she was a total stranger, i could not tell her that a middle-aged scribe like me made it a point to read each word on every T-shirt not just because i wanted to test my eyesight but also because a lifetime of editing articles whether in a typed format or on the computer had instilled in me a Pavlovian response of symbolically salivating over every sentence to check out whether the language was okay and the punctuation marks in place. I could not tell her that if i looked longer at the message on her T-shirt, it was merely a professional response.
T-shirts say it all for every occasion. Watch the telecast of any one-day international or T20 cricket match featuring the home team in India, and you will find boys in blue everywhere in the stadium and not just on the cricket field. George Bernard Shaw's quip that cricket was a game played by 22 flannelled fools and followed by 22,000 fools just needs a two-word change to be relevant today. Substitute flannelled with T-shirted, then add T-shirted to 22,000, and the fools can remain constant.
Likewise, Mao Zedong's exhortation of "Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend" could also be adapted for this day and age. "Flowers" could be replaced with "T-shirts" and "schools of thought" with "messages". These days, with the IPL T20 domestic tournament in full swing on prime-time television, blue is associated not with Team India but with the Mumbai Indians' club team, and yellow not with Australia but with the Chennai Super Kings. And it's not just cricket. Watch the telecast of Wimbledon, especially when the home favourite Andy Murray is playing. Sooner or later, when the TV cameras zoom in on the spectators, you will see a female tennis fan wearing a T-shirt saying "Andy, will you Murray me?"
Time was when during the struggle for Irish independence, playwright Dion Boucicault wrote, "She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen/ For they're hanging men and women there for the Wearing of the Green." Today, neither green nor any other colour warrants a death sentence. Everywhere on every clothesline you find T-shirts of all colours hanging. If T-shirts with messages had their way, there would be no question of anyone suffering any kind of identity crisis.
Three decades ago, news magazines would talk of workers of Indo-Japanese collaborations like Maruti-Suzuki starting the day with the company song to boost team spirit. Today, class distinctions of blue collar and white collar have been blurred at least in a sartorial sense by the T-shirt. The T-shirt gives us this sense of belonging, whether to a school, a college or an organisation. And so what if the message on a T-shirt saying "I am an Oxford Blue" is worn by a student who has represented the namesake in Bangalore and not the original university on the banks of the Isis. Oxford is a T-shirted state of mind.