Hairy tale

The last hair style that I sported was probably the best one I ever had. Many amused, fascinated, impressed and not-so-impressed observers of the psychedelic hairdo inquired about the story behind the hair-lift. Where I got the job done, remained the most popular question.

Well, I didn’t have to go to a specialized parlour to get my hair styled. Not that I hate men who visit men’s beauty parlours. This, after all, is the age of metro-sexuality, homo-sexuality and all other kinds of sexuality. I won’t even say that I myself don’t belong to the metro-sexual category. To be true to myself, if I get a free gift voucher to get my hair styled, or eyebrows modified, or pubic hair colored, in a male parlour, I might actually try it out, for the fun (or thrill) of it. But, paying anything more than twenty bucks from my own pocket for any kind of hair-play can never work for me. So, well, yeah, the bottomline is that I styled my hair myself. Talk about effective use of hands. I, like most other men, manage to use my hands effectively when it comes to satisfying myself and my body parts. I know how your perverted mind works, but the last sentence also means that I brush my teeth and cut my nails.

Leaving the teeth in the mouth and the nails in the dust-bin, let me come back to the silky topic of my hair. Although, many started referring to the style by a Japanese sounding word Mohawk, it never was a true Mohawk. Even before you finish reading this sentence, chances are that a new tab which has a Wiki entry on Mohawk has already opened. Go read it to agree with me. And if you never bothered to open the link (ineffective use of hands/fingers whatever), a true Mohawk hair-do needs the part of the hair on the right and on the left of the Mohawk to be shaved off, precisely what you see in the picture below.

I already had spikes before I happened to see TZP posters. Aamir Khan could be seen in the Mohawk-like hairdo in TZP. I didn’t get inspired by him. But the fact that weird shapes of hair were being promoted by Indian stars, did make me bolder in experimenting with my own spikes. Slowly, the spikes started resembling Aamir’s. We did have a similar hairdo for sometime, but nevertheless, both of us had slightly separate styles. Small differences, however, can only be noticed or appreciated by few god-gifted men in society. I guess all those few men who could notice that small difference between the two slightly different hair-styles, were on a vacation. I say so because just everyone who bothered to comment on my new look, included a reference to TZP without any exception. In the early phase of this accusation of piracy, I used to argue. With time and maturity however, I realized the pointlessness of trying so hard to highlight the difference that existed or to emphasize the fact that I had spikes even before I had seen Aamir’s new look. With more time and some more maturity, I learnt the art of smiling back with a shameless ‘yes, of course. TZP!’. It saved me time and it proved the commentators right, in turn making them feel blissed.

Like every good story, the story of my last hairdo had a sad end. With time, the hair expanded in length and I was made to realize the need of a hair-cut. Now, getting a hair-cut is of course one of the easiest things to do as long as you are not concerned much about the physical appearance of your head. But what is a metro-sexual that cannot give hair-cutting as much importance as a mother gives to her breast-feeding child?

There is a risk-prone zone in IIT Madras which many refer to as the Gurunath saloon or the insti saloon. It is the one and only barber-shop inside the campus. I call it a risk-prone zone, because once in, you never really know how you are going to look like after the scissors have been run and the razors have been glided over your skin. This place is nothing less than one of those science labs with defective equipments, where no human feat can ensure that the same experiment gives a common result. If an experiment does repeat identically, once in a while, call it the divine intervention. This, in brief, is what the insti saloon is for you.

Most IITians are high risk takers and exhibit minimal metro-sexuality. No wonder, the saloon works perfectly fine. Any time you step in the room with mirrors, you will find someone letting his hair being played with, by men in blue uniforms and non-smiling faces. My metro-sexual instincts did beep out loud those danger ringtones and to date, I wonder why I didn’t listen to them. I took my own sweet time to explain how the hair had to be cut. But alas, the communication took place in a language unknown to that young black boy in blue apron, who, throughout the monologue kept nodding. Bastard. It didn’t take him more than few seconds to run the machine brutally over the curved contours of my head, killing cruelly the style, that for years to come, I shall remember as the best hair-style I ever had.