Qualities of a Nice Girl

Said yes to a friend for bargain shopping company. She wanted to drag me all the way to the southern fringe of the city to Mahipalpur – Delhi’s famous factory outlet and second shop area. “It’s too far off,” thought I. Google told me about North India’s first (and only) ‘factory outlet mall’ at Vaishali, Ghaziabad. Much nearer. Naturally, I dragged her to Ansal Plaza, Vaishali. What she had in mind was a pair of five-pocket corduroy trousers. Her office doesn’t allow jeans; cords with the same cut are fine. Only no denim allowed.

We tried every store at the mall (which even on a holiday looked quite deserted, the top floor was still waiting for shopkeepers, most stores didn’t have much of decent stock but discounts there were many, ranging from 20 to 70 per cent), but with little luck. Disillusioned we gave Vishal Mega Mart a try and she found the stuff she wanted and that too for a decent price.

“Okay,” you say, “where’s the story?”

I’m coming to that. One thing that I unfailingly do when someone purchases an article of clothing is to read the attached tags. It is usually the usual blabber. The wash instructions and lots of self praise. But on reading the text attached to the pair that my friend purchased, I couldn’t comprehend much. Maybe someone can help. It read (I’ve removed the original all-caps for readability, the rest is verbatim):

Nice Girl
The spirit of style

This style choose to design with meticulous care from the excellent material but. Show the view of nature, generous and elegant!

The brand high class exquisite article dress, it deep to get the essence of the westernand traditional graft. With its cultured stitch the craft consummately, assist with the design that ages feels, make tasty obvious special, combine to make a point of the character make open, try hard for to make your every time worn to experience personally all can be relaxed in proper form, belong to the dress on article it is deep to suffer the high personal status the perso-nage of welcome

The bits that I could make out are:

“Show the view of nature, generous and elegant!” – for feminine clothing. Hmmm… Anyway, I double checked the zipper and the stitches.

“traditional graft” – well, we are champions in that.

“consummately, assist” – where exactly is it heading to?

“to suffer the high personal status” – the reader was already suffering.

Anyway, a consumer shouldn’t complain much, as long as the price is right and the quality satisfactory. If it hadn’t been for the language (I wonder who wrote this piece and how), it would have gone to that place where most of the kind go – the dustbin (I occasionally save a few good-looking ones to serve as bookmarks).