|
UK-Indian wins nose-stud battle
WSN Network
 London: When
Amrit Lalji, 40, British Indian, wife and mother of three, returns
to her humble job as cleaner and customer relations assistant at
Heathrow Airport’s VIP lounge on Saturday, she will do it as a
latter-day heroine.
The tiny stud in
Lalji’s nose will be intact. As it winks in the fluorescent glare of
the airport lights, the stud will symbolise its newly-realised
equivalence in British eyes to the gold wedding band married
Christians habitually wear.
For, Lalji has
speedily won back her job — and the right to wear a nose-stud —
within a month of being sacked for the offence of sporting a “facial
piercing” while on duty.
Lalji won her
challenge to employer Eurest, the giant catering and customer
support company, by producing a letter from her local Hindu
community to support her contention that a Hindu woman’s nose-stud
is not an adornment but an essential statement of her married
status. Eurest had ordered her to remove-it-or-removeyourself on the
grounds that “Jewellery can harbour bacteria, create a hazard when
working with machinery and find its way into the food people eat.”
But on Friday, a
Eurest spokesperson said Lalji’s dismissal “resulted from a
misunderstanding of rules relating to facial piercings (which are)
mandatory only in catering operations”. The company acknowledged
that “Since Mrs Lalji is not engaged in catering, her dismissal … is
therefore unjustified”. Restrained in victory, Lalji would only say
on Thursday night “I am happy I got my job back”.
More bullish
than Lalji about the nose-stud challenge, London’s mayor
Ken Livingstone, described her reinstatement as a “victory for
freedom of expression”.
Livingstone, who
is due to visit India next month
to drum up more tourist, educational and business interaction
between his megapolis and cities such as Mumbai and Delhi,
said Lalji’s “dismissal was a violation of those basic human rights.
I am glad that good sense has prevailed and I would urge every
employer to respect the rights of their employees to freely express
their beliefs”.
Relieved Hindu
community leaders here reiterated their view that Lalji was right to
insist, as a married woman, on wearing the nose-stud. They
reiterated that the nosestud “is an integral part of Amrit Lalji’s
faith. Many Hindu women have their nose pierced and fitted with a
stud for their wedding as part of the Shringar ritual. These marks
are not just the outward symbol of marriage — traditionally they are
believed to help ensure the match is harmonious.” But thoughtful
commentators say Lalji’s victory underlines officially
multi-cultural Britain’s
attempt to feel its way towards a more complete understanding of the
religious and cultural rituals of its large and diverse ethnic
minority communities.
10 October, 2007
|
Read Also