How many minutes of the day does one spend looking at the wardrobe, making trips to the mirror and back, checking out the various ensembles on oneself? It can go up to 15 to 20 minutes even on a rushed day, by the end of which there is a huge pile on the bed and one on the floor. At six days a week pre-pandemic, and maybe post-pandemic too, it comes to 480 minutes a month, or 8 hours a month. Gosh! And that’s not counting the minutes wasted picking up the discarded clothes.

Even if you spend half of that time, it comes to 4 hours a month. Still gosh!

But more often than not, after those agonising minutes of catwalking in the room, it’s the same suit or maybe two that you keep wearing, and the rest remain stacked in the upper shelves. Because those two suits suit you the best.

Some great people knew this and saved a lot of time. They chose a “uniform”. For Steve Jobs it was a black turtleneck and jeans. For Barrack Obama it was grey and blue suits (he should be having more time now to decide on his suits), for Marc Zuckerberg it’s a grey T-shirt and jeans and a hoody.

For me it’s a white cotton kurta with a pair of printed harem pants that keep turning up, promising me comfort through a gruelling tropical summer and automatically I feel better for I am in such august company. I don’t have to create the latest iPhone model or a healthcare package for a nation or attend Senate hearings to defend my company. Even so, I feel liberated. Liberated from the tyranny of choice-making, of time lost, of fatigue, of the fear of looking not right (FOLNR, if you please).

Wearing the same clothes everyday may not appeal to everyone. Clothes are about who you are, and different clothes express different aspects of your personality.

Besides, extreme minimalism can be an expression of extreme materialism. Of buying without even glancing at the price tag. Of flaunting the latest label that has arrived in town whether you look good or not.

But now, as we negotiate a pandemic, when everything is changing, we could perhaps rework our wardrobe rules as well. Maybe it’s time to count not just the clothes in the closet but the time wasted on them, the decision fatigue that accompanies them, the wasted energy that goes on choosing them, maintaining them, the piling of micro-waste on the earth’s fragile eco system that is produced by them, and the space that they occupy both in the shelf and inside our minds.

So maybe uniforming every day the way we did in school isn’t that bad. Maybe you have two or three uniforms. Maybe less is wise?