Recently I and wife needed to visit Kolkata. There we both sat down on a parapet near the pond and requested a passerby to click a photograph of both of us. He happily obliged us. Then we kept taking more individual photographs of a great picturesque location. Sudden a security guard came running to us. He was watching us getting photographed together from a distance. He said, “You sat wrongly. That is not the right way of sitting.” We thought that we probably took pictures at a prohibited place and he will soon delete the images we took. But soon we understood, that he meant something else. He wanted me, the men to sit on the right side and my wife, the women to sit on left side. He said married people should always sit in that order only. We asked him to take another photograph, the way he wished. He said, he had never taken a photograph earlier. I quickly trained him, how to click and he happily photographed us in the order he wanted us to sit. He was a happier man now. I too was happier, as I had already got the next topic I would write a post on.
From where at all this theory of men, women positioning must have started. I asked my friend Google and I got many versions. The most convincing one was that in olden days men needed to protect their better half by using a sword and as most people were always right handed, it was easier to keep the women on the left, so that right hand can be used freely. I also learnt about an unconvincing answer that as ‘Eve’ committed the sin of eating the apple, so churches decided for her to be always on the left side to remind her, that left is the side of evil. In fact some societies have the reverse arrangement too. Although, our modern society has moved far away from all sorts of positioning logics, I feel many people still like to carry the baggage of symbolism in the name of traditional values. So think twice, before taking a dinner seat in a restaurant or making a pose for a photograph, a waiter or guard may be on his way to give you his precious traditional wisdom.
Dr. Sunil Ji Garg
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