Written by – Vaibhav Kumar Singh
Caricature by – Samim Quadri
Cover Design by – Sarthak Deora
Editor – Shrey Paul
Baader–Meinhof phenomenon: a cognitive bias that causes people to notice something more frequently after they’ve recently learned about it.
I have a weird connection with shoes. If you want to understand a person, walk a mile in their shoes. I understand the idiom, I’ve experienced it, I believe in it. From childhood to being an adult I’ve read stories, watched movies, seen online videos, and Instagram reels which go something like this – There’s a middle class family. The son of the family keeps asking the father for something new and costly, usually a guitar, scooty, or shoes. The father has to deny the son his demands because of a lack of money. The son does not understand this financial trouble and gets angry. They have a fight, and later on, the son somehow ends up wearing the father’s shoes or sandals and finds out that there’s a hole in the footwear or it’s extremely uncomfortable to wear them, and in that moment the son realizes what all hardships his father has been going through to provide for the family.
I understand the stories, and I believe in the message. But, my papa wears shoes that are much costlier than mine.
There’s a theory, “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness”, which states that the reason the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. The poor have to buy cheap items that get worn out fast and thus they have to replace them again and again. A rich person buys an expensive item once which lasts for years, in turn saving more money for them. I am someone who’s against capitalism, and it’s a strange coincidence that this theory that so fittingly describes the unfairness of capitalism is also related to shoes.
It’s also said that you can tell a person’s wealth and personality by their shoes. In school I was in favor of uniforms, I am even in favor of uniforms in college. They’re cool. They serve the purpose of bringing uniformity- nobody gets to show-off their branded clothes, or pricey accessories, everyone is equal. But I also wholeheartedly believe that every student should be given the freedom to wear whichever shoes they want according to their comfort. But that single step breaks the uniformity. Two opposing ideas, both stand with me. And I believe in both equally.
I had this habit of using the same pair of shoes that I had for all purposes. I used the same ones for running, for daily wear, to go out somewhere, to play a sport, or anything else. I used to play football wearing my decathlon Kalenji shoes. They wore out, ripped from multiple places, so I went to the shoe-smith and got my shoes stitched. The stitches looked like a designed pattern. The person did such a fantastic job that I didn’t even feel the threads inside the shoes and yet it was a really strong hold. It also gave a fine street aesthetic to my fashion. I realized that not everything can be used for everything. Things and tools, need to be made for specific purposes to perform at their fullest. It also made me realize that you should hold onto stuff, things should be made such that they are easy to repair.
If I remember correctly, the following are the shoes (other than school shoes) that I have bought till the date ‘20th September 2024’ – the red liberty shoes, the heavy blue reebok shoes, the unbranded light blue shoes, the predator football studs, the grey Kalenji running shoes, the green Nike shoes, the blue pink Nike shoes which I had exchanged for the green Nike shoes, the green Shrileather shoes, and the recent orange blue shoes which my mama gave to me. These are the ones that I remember. I was growing up fast, so I used to get shoes much bigger than my size, which lasted me for many years. And now I have a lot more shoes, thus they last me longer. In those earlier days, all I had a say in was the color of the shoes, that too only if my mother and sister liked them. Then I started choosing the style of the shoes too. Later, I got the full freedom to choose whichever shoes I wanted, with no restrictions, aesthetic or monetary. And yet, the most pricey shoes that I have are still ₹3000 short of my father’s shoes.
My Nana died when my Ma was very young. He worked as a branch manager for the Bata shoe company. He was a man who looked into the future – he had bought quite some land in various places, and had lots of investments and policies in his name. He was a well settled man. He had invested a lot of money in all sorts of areas from real estate to stocks. When he died, his fortune was left for his six daughters, but all his wealth was transferred to my nani’s brothers and their sons. They all somehow ended up opening lots of shoe shops and businesses with my nana’s wealth which should’ve gone to my mother and my maasi’s. I never thought about it much till I got into the depth of these stories. I’ve always behaved well towards them. They are rich, filthy rich, and most, if not all from the seed money from what my nana left behind. Yet, it is indeed a weird realisation that none of them ever gifted me or even offered me a free pair of shoes.
In school, schools, through all the schools that I changed, my mother always got me the best shoes for the school uniform. I never bought the ones that the school stationery sold, instead, we went to outside shops and got the best one there. The campus, canvas, liberty, and bata shoes. In CRPF Public School, we could wear any black shoes we wanted, but there were very specific white shoes that they sold from the school, and that’s what we had to wear. It was a really bad shoe. The sole was super thin, it hurt your feet on running, and the canvas cloth was also quite cheap and bad. It ripped like leaves on sandpaper and was also really slim, so if you played football, hitting the ball the correct way would hurt your feet. I slowly stopped wearing those white shoes and always wore the black ones. For sports, I either played barefoot or got my different shoes. And as I played basketball, I was allowed to wear basketball sneakers instead of the cheap school shoes. In school, we used to rub chalk on our white shoes to make them look clear and shiny. After I reached the peak of my height and stopped growing, that was around 9th I think, I wore the same black shoes for the rest of my school years.
When I got into my first college, Maharaja Agrasen College, we used to have a lot of free time because our classes got canceled a lot. So we used to play football and basketball and volleyball and table tennis a lot. At that time I started using my studs again. A classmate of mine, Vibhu, taught me quite a lot of things about football, and because I had the studs, I was more comfortable. I learned how to make a curved shot, and how to aim, only with my right leg though, but I did. I also played freely because I wasn’t afraid to hurt others, all of them were equally good players. And another thing was that because I had the studs and I used to play a little good, I was selected for the department team. I wonder if I got that chance only because I had the shoes.
When COVID was ending (‘ending’ as in when things were getting back to how they were before COVID), I used to go to the park every morning and I used to play football with middle-aged uncles and young children. There were many people, and we used to play for long hours. Sometimes the matches were three to four hours long. We used to play in small teams, big teams, all sorts of teams. So I went online to buy football shoes, found a sale for entry-level studs and a free football with it. It was a no-brainer to buy them. I used to play wearing them with those uncles and all. It was fun, I got a small amount of advantage, and it was a good experience.
When I went to Maharaja Agrasen College, I bought a new pair of shoes. Nike’s ‘Gianni’s immortals’. Costly shoes for me, but they were good. Light, comfortable, and stylish. My sister says that if you’re spending money on something, get it to be as good as possible, exchange it, return it if it’s not good, but always, always get your money’s worth. And as I used to wear them sometimes while playing football, or perhaps because I washed them like clothes, they got a bit torn. They were still under warranty so I wrote an email to Nike and it turned out that they were exchanged quite easily. This time, I bought a color that was much more colorful, blue and pink, an amazing combination, and it works together really well. And that’s how I feel about myself, some things that shouldn’t work together, but they do and create something unique. Maybe shoes do tell you a lot about a person.
In 12th class, I was contacted by one of my school friends that there is an online competition going on and they’d like me to be part of the team. At that time I was really interested in 3d printing. I got an idea of making 3d printed shoes, everyone liked it, and we took that idea forward. While researching I found that some other companies were already doing it, so I made my pitch as convincing as possible. We prepared a whole company, which we eventually found out was the wrong move. We should’ve worked more on the idea and implementation instead of focusing so much on the company and money part. The crazy thing is that once again, we came up with shoes. At that time too I thought about how shoes are in so many parts of my life. And that’s when I realized for the first time that shoes are a big deal for the whole wide world too. Our actual idea was that we’d print shoes exactly to the person’s size and they can have whatever they want printed on the shoe. Now I know that shoes can be made from recycled plastic, but not exactly with the method that we had thought of then. We reached the semifinals, so that’s cool too. My ideas are good. Just not always at the right place or right time.
Anthropometry is the study of human body measurements. How the various parts are shaped, what size they are, how long they are, and what’s their reach in different postures. In my 3rd semester of B.Des, we learned about this in ergonomics. Our professor was a very learned person, a bit old and harsh in the way that old people are, but he was a knowledgeable guy. He told us lots of stories and what he had achieved throughout his life. He was telling us how other countries spend so much money on anthropometric data to design and make things better suited for their country, but India doesn’t. It doesn’t do all that because the politicians in our country do not see value in scientific research and just want to import things because that’s easier and cheaper for them in the short term, but harms the people in the long term. And one of the biggest examples of this is how India does not have its own shoe sizing. Nobody greenlights a research project for measuring lakhs of feet just so India can have its own shoe measurement system. Our professor was telling us this, and I was thinking about how shoes have come back in my life once again. Maybe I can one day get this research done, I do love categorizing stuff like this. And I once again feel that such a big huge thing is my personal responsibility. * I’m sure I’ll keep noticing more of these events and tie them with shoes somehow. And as I keep changing my shoes, my perspectives will keep shifting. And maybe one day, this weird connection with shoes would have ended up with me having walked a mile in everyone’s shoes.
I’m sure I’ll keep noticing more of these events and tie them with shoes somehow. And as I keep changing my shoes, my perspectives will keep shifting. And maybe one day, this weird connection with shoes would have ended up with me having walked a mile in everyone’s shoes.