The Hairmen In Our Lives

Seated in front of the laptop, I write this, feeling exuberant. Exuberant seems to put it a touch too mildly perhaps. To say I am basking for the nonce in joie de vivre would be mot juste. The reason is very straightforward. After nearly a year or so, I have finally managed to get a satisfactory haircut of my liking. Satisfactory. Hmm… is the exact word I am looking for. To women who shop all day and zero in on that one piece of kitschy habiliment and to men who fantasize scores of potentially suitable hairstyles and finally nail down the one which in their minds brings out the best of both worlds –The heights of 'handsomeness' and concealment of alopecic tendencies just about to the right extent, satisfactory is a word of paramount importance. And it is undeniably a self-centered and narcissistic emotion. Imagine it this way. The woman who made that garish purchase, not up to the minute with the dernier cri in the sartorial world doesn’t give two hoots about what the scenesters in her circle think, as that purchase gave her the ultimate gratification. Likewise the man, never the one au courant with the style du jour, doesn’t care a sod as to what a revolting sight his unprepossessing hair has turned into, as long as he feels his new hair dressing embodies the pinnacle of manly beauty.

Right from my college days, it has always been a rather on and off love story between self and hairdressers, and it continues till today. There are 4 distinct commandments in the 'Men’s guide to the Perfect Haircut – Beginner Version' that every man stepping out into the big wide world must be aware of. I will expound them in detail.

Commandment Numero Uno. The principal motto that any man, particularly the juvenescent or the bachelor type needs to enshrine in his rubric, when he proceeds to get a haircut, is to avoid any potential temptations of attachments to one single hairdresser or a hair cutting establishment. This is applicable for the entirety of his life. It is perfectly normal to predict that the same chap behind the rolling chair who produced a perfect hair cut on the previous occasion can turn your hair into a total disaster in the next outing. I will illustrate this through an example. I vividly remember one occasion a lustrum ago in my halcyon MBA days in IIFT Delhi, when I got a terrific haircut from a chappie who plied his trade in the putrescent bylanes of Katwaria Sarai. I was on cloud nine similar to today. Normally the one vocally self-critical about my appearance all the time, even I felt I could haven’t looked better. The near perfect results gave me the necessary ammunition to embark on a romantic pursuit of feminine interest. An entire trimester was expended in doing the arduous spade work in terms of establishing communication, initiating combined studies, late night coffee & Maggi chit-chats à deux at the Nescafe under the pretext of group project work, and what not. At the beginning of the next trimester, when the hair grew incommensurate with the size of my skull, I went back to that venerable tumbledown one wintry morning as the penultimate step in the wooing process. The cardinal blunder I did was to doze off (thanks to some late night preparatory work for a Guest Lecture or some such rot) after giving the guy the usual do’s and don’ts - Which is pretty simple and has remained constant throughout – Don’t shorten the back and front too much but you can shear off the center hairy portion more closely. I don’t know if it was my execrable Hindi accent or what, the imbecile misread my instructions and did exactly the opposite! When I woke up to my horror, I found I resembled what my dad would frequently term in Tamil as 'Uricha Kozhi' translating to Skinned Chicken! All that I had initially planned out, had to be defenestrated into the garbage bin along with my hair. The final instalment of my mission was to ensorcell the object of interest by means of a coup de foudre of sorts, take her on a date before the trance wore off and suggest a merger, which eventually never came to fruition as I knew I would come a pathetic cropper if I were to even get within a ten foot pole distance of her! This explains why I keep changing my hairdressers all the time. Every alternate occasion, the fellow bungles.

Which neatly segues into Commandment No. 2 reifying the 'Caveat Emptor' rule. Marketing and Sales birds will know this by the back of the thumb, but for the benighted blokes who haven’t tasted much success in the world of haircuts, let me elucidate in the most simplistic terms – If you want an appealing look whether it is a haircut or a shave, the ownership of the tonsorial output solely rests on you. No point in scapegoating the hairdresser if he turns you into a beastly clown, for it is you who has to pay the ultimate price of becoming an object of derision ranging from a few days at the very least to a good couple of months at max! So one of the most challenging portions in any of my quarterly trysts with the coiffeur, is to bring myself to play this rule to perfection. In my case it is the shaving part which demands devotion of extra attention. It takes a quite a handful of miscalculated snips of the erroneous scissor to know the haircut is going astray (unless you flake out like I did in the aforementioned occasion), which gives you enough leeway to bring back the man into line. But in case of a shave where the margins are too thin, extra caution is of the essence. Still its fine if it is a clean shave that you are looking for, for one can’t mess about the hair too much as all of it is going to go to the cleaners anyways, but if it is a more intricate one, where skilled sleight of hand is imperative and uninterrupted concentration is of the essence from both parties. You need to monitor every second like a hawk. All it takes is one momentary lapse of focus, or a sudden inexplicable urge to go harder with the sacred razor on a softer spot or any other cack-handed behavior to land you in deep trouble. The entire map will end up as a mockery. Post the Katwaria Sarai incident, I have maintained a high level of fastidiousness every time I hit the parlor. I settled on a French beard a year and half back, as the best possible way to arrange my whiskers. One of the mistakes nature did was to lower the keratin content in the left of my stiff upper lip where the moustache encounters the beard. The costive hair follicles on this small portion make the reduced growth a tad too conspicuous, so I need to put the area under strict surveillance when the man is about to do the editing. I tell him to leave that portion while he can trim out the remainder to maintain parity with the right side. So understand my friends, attention to detail is sine qua non.

Commandment No. 3. More often than not there will be atleast one peculiar aspect of the process which is bound to get you narked up. It is impossible to enter the parlor and maintain a state of perfect ataraxy till the time you get out. And hairdressers have the uncanny knack of bringing out the vitriolic side out of the most unflappable men through some pestiferous idiosyncrasies. I have two which sit perched right atop the scroll of honour. The first one is courtesy of the only modicum of divertissement one can find within the fusty room, apart from the unedifying tete-a-tete between 2 senescent septuagenarians queueing at the back. And that’s the TV. 90% of the time, the content that is broadcasted is appalling - Hackneyed soap operas, unheard of music channels playing vapid movie songs video jockeyed by some abject loser, or abominable reality show programmes masquerading in the name of entertainment. Irrespective of whether it is Delhi or Chennai, Hyderabad or Bangalore, only the vernacular varies, the substance remains the same across the length and breadth of the country’s parlors. I don’t know if it is some sort of a meditative fodder for the hairdresser, but the double-hatting apparently helps in his case to concentrate on the cutting while invigorating his frivolous senses. Most of my time is usually spent royally ignoring what blares on the idiot box. But there is always one golden minute in that half an hour pile of abysmal drivel, which is bound to attract your attention and make you train your senses on it. It could be a short clipping of one of Vadivelu’s uproarious rib-ticklers or some exceptional movie song featuring your favorite svelte actress, commanding your attention and gaze. The eyes magnetically roll up and you wish that everything else can be paused for that one minute. It is exactly during this critical juncture that the pestilential fellow will violently turn your fixated head to the opposite side or push it down, so that he can start chopping away the locks on the other end or from the back. If you gently try to turn your head TV-wards he will again return the favor, this time with a more forceful shove. On one occasion I remember while in the midst of a haircut, a fellow hair-dresser sitting idle on the adjacent rolling chair who was switching channels abruptly stopped at SUN Music which was playing 'Ragasiya Kanavugal', one of my favorite numbers. I involuntarily retracted my bent-down face, to catch a couple of quick glances of the stunningly winsome Trisha, as the least expectant hairdresser jerked into a fit of spasm, and severed off a small portion of my ear! Similar painful experiences have taught me that the best way to deal with such situations is to stop the chap in his tracks when you want a breather and pretend to scratch an itchy ear or nose, thereby getting a few precious seconds to wink at the moving celluloid images.

The other quirk of hairdressers that used to grind my gears at a time when I used to go for a clean sweep of the facial plains, was their insistence to slather your moustache with a rich foamful lashing of Gillette Shaving Cream followed by the beard, but then having a go at the beard first. This initially seemed ok on first thoughts, for it was natural to imagine, that after the beard is gone, the moustache would duly accompany. But I was mistaken. After the first round, it was procedural to expect a second shave with a lesser dollop of the cream to ensure there are no hirsute traces. After all it is called Double-Foam shave! But almost across India, hairdressers had and perhaps still have this obsession to focus on the beard for a good quarter of an hour. Being an operations management student at first, I appreciate that sometimes one has to endure the LIFO principle in life as well, but not at the cost of the moustache indurating into a floe of sticky white gloop, quickly attracting the attention of keenly scrutinizing flies that are buzzing about the vicinity.  The couple of minutes that lapses between the completion of the full beard shave and the start of the moustache shaving is one of the most frustrating moments in the exercise. I remembering trying to tell the chaps numerous times sometimes even begging them that they either shave off the moustache immediately after the beard, or fully finish the beard before even applying the cream to the moustache but it always fell on deaf ears.

And that beautifully flows into the last of the quartet of commandments, and a fitting rebuttal to the previous one. You are well within the right to have your own quirks! And something that can pique the hairdresser adds icing to the cake! In my case the end is the most pleasing and intended to ensure it is not anticlimactic. After the haircut and shave is completed, the hairdresser, moisturizes the face with a few droplets of H2O, smears the aromatic camphor-flavored facial cream on the besprinkled dial and daubs the after shave lotion which is followed by a fleeting horripilation, a feeling not unlike to what Louis XVI of France must have experienced when the searing blade of the incoming guillotine made contact with his neck. Then a tender massage of the head follows. And then a soothing calm descends upon the motionless body now reposed in a state of torpor. The hairdresser pleased that the ordeal is over, approves with the nod of one who has done his job to perfection – A signal that you can get up, pay up and leave. This is where I insert my rejoinder. Staying firmly rooted to the spot, I ask him to pick up the razor again and ask him to scrape the clean shaven face in the reverse direction. The reactions vary from bloke to bloke and time to time depending on the mood. Some take it sportively and give in, and some protest in exasperation as if to say “Eh what?” Some take it personally as if the credentials of their craft have been brought to question, and some demand an explanation for the strange request. Every single time so far, I have had one logic which has worked to perfection – An inveterate lie that I have an interview the next day and though he (the hairdresser) has done a good job, it would need a bit more chiseling, and that I can still see very miniscule hairs, that need to be pruned out, which is possible only if we shave against the grain. I could have asked him at the very end of the shaving round, but I wait till the very end, to riposte this. Imagine a Kenyan athlete who after completing the 20 mile stretch under the scorching sun and collapsing in exhaustion after breasting the tape, is told by the marathon organizers, that there is another couple of miles to go and they had wrongly marked the finishing line! It is a not so dissimilar sight, to see the poor chap, cursing under his breath, as he takes razor in hand and obliges. Dermatologists will warn such an approach could cause razor bumps and skin irritations, but that’s the price I am ready to pay for the pleasurable feeling and to relish the delectable moment of pure Schadenfreude! Voilà!

Coming out of my reverie, I hasten to the mirror and gaze at it for a good minute or two. Marveling the contents of the reflection once more I realize what a charmer I am. Phew if only I hadn’t walked down the aisle, I wouldn’t quell any bobbing emotions and would be all ready to set off cantering like a knight in shining armor in rescue of the nearest damsel in distress, confident that this time lady luck will smile on me, both literally and metaphorically!