The Years of Tuneless Caterwauling

Whenever I come home to Chennai, I usually conduct my soul-searching saunters near Venus Colony, a posh locality within Alwarpet in South-Central Chennai where I live. It is one of those relatively tranquil and bosky neighbourhoods, serrated with trees, a welcome change from the otherwise pullulating metropolis, that envelops every other step I cover.

Today was one of those fine mornings, when I made a bee-line for Venus Colony. I was in a fairly meditative mood, pursing my lips and chewing them a good deal while I was brooding over my career, future or some such rot that I can’t exactly recollect, when I was shaken up from my reverie by a gallimaufry of sounds emanating from the precincts of a house snugly ensconced towards the end of a cul-de-sac on the left. The keen discerning ear could detect an assortment of musical voices springing forth, with varying tenor and intonation. There was a deeply mellifluous feminine voice, which intertwined with the baritone which was unmistakably suggestive of one who was uninterested but was forced to do a spot of singing. There was one distinct masculine voice which thundered with bellicosity, while there was a chorus of shrieking squeals in accompaniment. All in all the cantative spirit on display combined to produce a cacophony which threatened the peace of the environs, and I decided to ascertain the facts once and for all. Taking a detour, I approached the house and saw a board hammered to the gate, blaring the words “Rasika School of Carnatic Music”.

Of course it had to be! What else could I expect from this part of the city where arts and culture took center-stage particularly amongst the gentry, Carnatic Music in particular being nurtured, developed and promoted under the auspices of institutions such as the Narada Gana Sabha and Music Academy at close quarters, and a good portion of the populace residing in these parts belonging to a certain community patronating the development of singing skills in their offsprings virtually from the moment they hatched from the egg.

While I was reminiscing with a hand resting firmly on the gate, there was a sudden shrill that rent the air “Shreee Ganaaaa Naatha…” In the minute that had lapsed there had been a one minute hiatus, possibly a water break where the music teacher undoubtedly had some heated words for a lesser disciple who sang a different verse. So the shrill, goaded by the teacher, came at a good bit of jarring intensity. I had enough. I quickly beat a hasty retreat to my walking route, massaging my aching ears. But there was something in the shrillness of that voice giving me a feeling of déjà vu, and in an instant I was taking a trip down memory lane.

Rewind to almost a quarter of a century earlier, when I was a stripling of about 5 I have a faint recollection of my first Carnatic music class somewhere in Adayar in South Chennai where we initially resided. The reasons for my enrolment were manifold but straightforward. Belting out the top ones that come to my mind are:

a) The community from where I hail, where it is almost sacrilege to not be part of the Carnatic Music circuit in some way, shape or form. Either you had to be au fait about the latest trends in the field if you wished to command a certain degree of respect within the social circle, or at the very least show your inclination towards the field – switching on a radio that blares ‘Suprabhatam’ by M.S.Subbulakshmi every single morning or some Kutchery of some accomplished singer blaring on Sunday TV are handy pre-requisites at the very minimum.

b) It was a certain zeitgeist, to learn Carnatic Music, a peer pressure of sorts, in the 90’s which stood at the cusp of the new millennium waiting to herald in an era of technological revolution. It was a time where TV & Computers were becoming increasingly accessible and newer forms of media began to proliferate. TV channels mushroomed quickly sensed the need to appetize hunger for entertainment and these channels carved out reality shows and programs to spot and hone musical talent. I remember TV shows such as Samsung Sapthaswarangal, Raagamaliga etc. garnered fair share of the TRP ratings, so much that 90’s kids like myself keep harking back to those heydays on Youtube. All in all when yealings of 8 or 9 showed off their precocious singing prowess on air, my parents used to start kicking up my backsides!

c) My grandmother was one of the most instrumental forces in the attempts to sow the seeds of musical inclination in the fecund yet barren mental field of a stripling of five. A lady who herself brick by brick built herself a name in the field of ‘Bhajan’ and ‘Namasankeerthanam’ (Devotional Singing), a Bhagavatha Sironmani herself, she has been running the Sri Kamakshi Mandali and Sri Geetha Govinda Mandali, since 1976 under the patronage of TAMBRAS and Bhagavatha Seva Trust. She and her troupe have performed in Bhajan carnivals across the length and breadth of the country, and is a highly distinguished and respected figure in the field. So it was natural to assume that a lady who has helmed an assortment of middle aged ladies to keep doing this for nearly half a century, would find it child’s play to assert her dominance on me. She was (and still is!) a forceful personality, and even though her intentions were genuine and has the milk of human kindness sloshing forth in her otherwise, one cannot take away the fact that it was a fool-hardy enterprise to assume naturally that I would take to Carnatic Music like fish to water. It was initially under her tutelage that I began to learn my ropes. Over time with her influence and guidance I began to learn music under eminent singers in the Carnatic world such as Rukmani Ramani and Suguna Purushothaman.

d) On a personal note, which I must admit must have been the cardinal factor that led to my learning Carnatic Music (and eventually my growing distaste purely from a singing perspective) was also one that excited my parents to no bounds - My voice! I had a voice that could pierce through the ozone layer if required. It was one of those shrieking voices that could stop a thousand clocks and bring life to the deafest of ears. My levels of decibel intensity touched such dangerously dizzy heights, that my parents thought, if there was one chap who could thwart the accomplishments of luminaries in the field such as Madurai Mani Iyer or Balamuralikrishna, it invariably should be me.

Discarding all the above factors, however the biggest error that my parents committed or rather an oversight that should have never been overlooked during such unwieldy deliberations was to ascertain if I was personally inclined to be signed up for it. They took it for granted that I would have a natural inclination and proclivity towards singing and Carnatic music. At age 4 0r 5 or 6 your faculties are so under-developed you don’t rebel or talk back. So naturally I was introduced to the field as a fait accompli. I outperformed other students when it came to the department of voice. My voice stood out distinctly amongst the others and my music teacher, a wizened old lady who herself was a big name a few decades earlier, discerned an incredible singer lurking beneath. She used to tell my parents that my voice could single-handedly take me to great heights even if there was work to be done in the Raagam (a set of rules for building a melody) and Thaalam (Beat) departments.

Despite bouts of schoolboy recalcitrance, I was nonetheless forcibly thrust into every possible opportunity that came my way to showcase my singing proficiency. Whenever guests used to come home, it was some Geetham or Varnam of sorts such as the famed ‘Ra Ra Venu’ or ‘Ninnukori’ that I was ordered to whip out, and almost everytime I left the guest amazed with the shrillness of my voice. These were followed up with concomitant platitudinous blandishments that if I kept my focus and diligence intact I could peak empyrean heights in the field of music. All this encouraged my parents a great deal which meant that wherever we moved during childhood (Thanks to my father’s travelling IT job we saw a good deal of Bangalore, New Jersey and shuttled within Chennai a few times), my Carnatic Music coaching inevitably followed. As age progressed, my interest in my own learning of the art began to visibly wane but my parent’s prodded on by my grandmother only increased with an equal if not more intensity. I vividly remember even in New Jersey where I studied my 4^th grade, my father used to drive me down 22 miles one-way every Sunday morning from East Brunswick to Plainsboro, where one of our ilk, an NRI taught Carnatic Music at $10 per hour. During the December music season of Margazhi (The unofficial winter month of Chennai) where temperatures take mercy on the soul and plummet to 23 degrees in the night, I was taken to attend Kutchery (Concerts). All these were designed with the sinister intention of forcibly implanting a desire to cultivate the seed of Carnatic music.

However, if there is an inherently mutual incompatibility latent all along between two entities, then try as you might, you cannot reconcile both of them. Whenever singing of Carnatic Music and self were involved, try as you might to marry us both, we were destined to come apart sometime or later. There was one such incident which hammered the final nail into the coffin of my singing career. And that came during my sacred thread ceremony in 2003.

Even as a small kid, I found rituals and other concomitant appendages to religion and spirituality which lacked in science and rationality jarring. Be spiritual but why making a fucking show of it, has been my life-long argument. The sacred thread ceremony was one of the most bitter experiences in this regard where I was made to undergo torture for a couple of days – sitting in front of made up pyres, chanting mantras and being forced to undergo utterly useless and archaic procedures done to appease specific societal expectations. What added a strikingly repugnant note to it was it was planned in March of all months, just as the searing Chennai heat begins to pluck out the juices and hangs the body dry. On the second day just as the ceremony was coming to an end towards the closure of the luncheon hour, I wanted to get back home to catch the start of the World cup semifinals between India and Kenya, when I was held back by my family. Apparently my dad had organized a small get musical get-together where friends and relatives could spend some time showcasing their musical talents. Therefore it came as no surprise that I was forced to belt out a couple of Carnatic songs which I had been learning.

The watershed moment had finally arrived! The straw that would eventually break the camel’s back was placed on top of it. I gave a look lacklustre to the drop and with all my effort sung the worst song of my life, in a countertenor much to the shock of the audience who had gathered to hear the heights of my voice in all its glory. It indubitably set the years lent to development of my Carnatic music skills, quivering in it’s foundations. That was my swansong (pun intended) and since then I have never been asked to sing, much to my peace and satisfaction.

After several years, on retrospection, it indeed sounds ironical today, I must admit! Had I persevered half as much as my parents did, I might have made some kind of mark in the field and it possibly could have paved a way for me into playback singing. Considering Sid Sriram and self were born just a few months apart, I might have given the bloke a run for his money, who knows! But fortunately I don’t have regrets. I am happy to addictedly play ‘Ennadi Maayavi Nee’ or ‘Inkem Inkem Inkem Kavale’ on loop as his fan and be an armchair critic in equal measure if needed, while I continue to ply my trade as a capacity planner with Amazon Customer Service. 

To each his own, puts it about mot juste. But those truly were the years of tuneless caterwauling!

Midnight Musings in the Wake of COVID-19 Crisis

I step outside my home, to survey the eerie environs of the main road, which is usually astir with activity even at this time of the night.

I spot a pack of stray dogs squabbling over a piece of food. When they sight me, plodding by the side, they cease their contretempts and cock an eyeful towards me. I detect an unusual glint in their eyes. My heart skips a beat. It isn’t something that I haven’t experienced before. I have had far more animated encounters with the canine species since the days of my boyhood, when I used to out-cycle, with impeccable ease, chasing dogs, at Five in the morning en-route to Rosario’s Academy for the morning Chemistry tuitions in preparation for my High School Board Examinations. The dogs however caught me off-hand several time when I was on foot, particularly near De Monte’s colony beneath the flickering street lights. In such cases, I was spared but not before pleading to the mercy of the dogs. It was just barking and growling while I used to walk back home, but not before ending up chilled to the bone. However on this occasion, there is no barking or growling. Just silence, as the dogs unanimously look at me with snarling teeth. This time the experience is far more terrifying.

I move along the road, and see cats of all hues crossing the street, with a touch of authoritativeness which was unseen in the past. An age old adage goes – “While the cat’s away the mice will play”, and it does seem the cats now enact the part of the mice, while the human cats lie locked down at home. I generally take a more kindlier view of the feline race. I stop by near a pert and plumpy cat, taking a breather in the middle of the street, as if it owned it. Cats usually shy away from humans and mind about their business. I respect them for taking this stand of bonhomie. But on this occasion, I discern a thinly concealed air of hauteur in it’s demeanour. The stolid cat in question refuses to move, comfortably ensconced. I am fairly bothered by this display of irreverential insouciance. Maybe my disconcertment is unconfounded. It might just be the curious case of the cat that is scanning the street gutters for rodents from its seat of poise. But I continue to be flustered as I trudge along.

Talk of rodents is enough to render a man with finer sensibilities such as me off colour in itself. The sight of one can get me even queasier. However the sight of two of the largest bandicoots I have seen in my life, sauntering by my side on the bylane, is calculated enough to bleach my hair. Absolute whackers! Again the distress caused here emanates more from their overall comportment, rather from their presence or size. I am very well aware rodents being largely relegated in their status to the dregs of fauna, don’t roam on the loose despite being unrestrained. True they wallow all their lives in putridity, act as carriers for pandemics, but for sure don’t possess the gall to roam about at large without caring two hoots about the world. Even when they have to come out of sewers from time to time, they quickly slither back into burrows and try to avoid contact with humanity. The fact that despite spotting an approaching human, they choose to traipse on the sidelines with panache is cause enough for distress.

As I moodily walk back home, I strangely begin to realize that the trysts that are lined up will begin to alter my notions in significant proportions. I can hear at once a gallimaufry of sounds – The baritone of a braying donkey couple of avenues away intertwined with the unfettered bovine mooing in motion, offset by the contralto of hungry frogs as friendly woofs from invigorated dogs enjoin in accompaniment.

As I take a short detour to a relatively bosky and tree-serrated cul-de-sac on the left, an avian melody awaits me. An assortment of bird sounds rend the nocturnal air. The mellifluous squealing of mynahs marries the soprano of cuckoos. The euphonious twitter of sparrows countervails the squawking of parrots, as the hooting of owls binds with the cawing of crows. The bird world sings in all its glory, as the nests of the trees, metamorphosize into stages of musical delight. There is no obfuscation by human induced cacophony.

I look up. The sky is noctilucent as the refulgence of the moon spills onto the street and illuminates it. The pellucidity of the un-polluted air paves way for sighting entangled constellations which concurrently opalesce in the stelliferous firmament.

As I head back into home, I realize I don’t want to go inside. I prefer to stay outside and immerse myself in the immaculate heraldry of flowering bestiality and the splendour of nature and lie inextricated sempiternally. My whole view of dogs, cats and even rats tergiversates as I realize this is but a microcosm of the way the world functioned prior to the invasion of Homo sapiens.

This will not last long. Once the battle with the virus is ineluctably won, a pyrrhic victory no doubt, we will be back to usurp power, wresting it from its rightful owners, weaving daily sins of commission, leaving the world crippled again under acts of esurience and despoliation. The short lived reign of the 'Kingdom Animalia' will end, and the sky shall not be as pristine as it is now.

But till then we should make the most of the remaining days of this black swan event which has pulverized the world, and bask in the one irrefutable good that it has brought with it – Solitude and Peace.

Crossed Wires

A mangled heap of wires

Black, thin and rubbered

Lie in my palms

Menacingly intertwined

Seemingly inextricable

The more I try to unknot, the more I tilt at the windmills

The more I try to cut the Gordian knots, the more I end up in tangles

Try as I may to unweave, I enmesh into a new-fangled mess

The fact remains

Music shall avoid my ears

In Solitude, though possible, it may still

Enter into different ears if I decide to sodcast

Do I want it?

I don’t know

I give up. I deliberate

The extrapolation of the crossed wires

To more bombastic proportions of entanglement

Where wires lie crossed

Over the troubled waters of life

Can I re-purpose the tangled assortment of problems

With the vast multitude of people?

Should I let my music

My soul music, meant solely for me

Out to the unwilling world?

Or should I move heaven and earth

Fight tooth and nail

To extricate the wires

And let myself immerse in plaintive melody?

Assiduous attempts I can still make

But they still may fling me back into an abyss of nothingness

A vexing conundrum indeed

I have made up my mind

I shall temporize

And swim with the flow

Either I will reach

Fate’s grand old paradise

Or dystopify into hell’s excruciating tunnels

I will not regret if it’s the latter

I will rejoice if it’s the former

If it is eventually the latter

I will brave the tunnel till

I get to land’s end where I can

Gambol into the greensward of the former

Either ways, life will sort itself out

Intellect Over Dogma. The Real Eclipse I Would Like To See Tomorrow

Ah! This religious brouhaha surrounding the solar eclipse

Tomorrow makes me feel in what age do we live?

The world despite all science and tech it equips

Lives a couple of millennia behind as a captive

Incurably chained to fossilized and viciously obsolescent dogma

And yet paints non-conformists with a stigma

For something scarcely their fault

Oh Mankind! Hope you can vault

Over to an empyrean orbit

In pursuit of wisdom and rationale

Till the world becomes better to re-inhabit

Making the pale blue dot an exotic locale

Where high ideals and intellect reigns supreme

And every human of the race forms it’s crème-de-la-creme

Traversing Alongside Superstitions

My dad was just stepping out

To purchase the weekly groceries

From a far corner, I was tempted to shout

''Where are you going, tell me please’’?

The words escaped me accidentally

An old habit, picked up as an inquisitive kid

More than intentional, rather inadvertently

But too late it was, it was a wrong thing I did

For I had just stirred up a hornet’s nest

My granny who was tying her hair

Shot up with a leap of zest

Nearly uprooting the chair

She charged for'ard training her guns

On her hapless grandson who stared at the preacher

''How many times have I told you?'' she bellowed, ''don’t you have any sense?''

Not to ask someone leaving the house on whereabouts about the departure

Hmm, so I am sure you got the hold

Grasping the underlying theme,

A common scene in a Tamil household

Where superstitions reign supreme

One evening looking into the mirror

Realized the hair was disheveled, beard unkempt

A sight I recoiled with horror

The uncomfortable scene I began to pre-empt

Slowly opened the door, hoping to plot a secret escape

To my favorite salon the 'Green Trends'

When my shrewd mother spotted the door agape

Sadly there wasn’t time to make quick amends

''Don’t you know it is a Tuesday'' ?

She chided, clenching her teeth

The barber is shunned today

I returned to my room, in anger I could only seeth

One night, at the foot of the table, I stubbed my toe

Rocketing up instantly, groaning in pain

Little realizing the nails I had allowed to grow

For personal hygiene isn’t my expertised domain

I went and fetched a nail cutter

Once the blood stopped to ooze

Lingering pain was still bitter

But now was ready to cater to the bruise

The nails I started chopping away

When granny shimmered into the hall

At the sight of her I stopped midway

Face automatically turning towards the wall

Nails shouldn’t be cut post setting of the sun

She serves as a final warning

To her beloved grandson

''Go to bed. You can cut them in the morning''

One day, I was rushing to catch a flight

Knowing the appalling traffic, I had only a glimmer

Of hope, still cutting it a bit too tight

Untimely moments precipitated to make prospects dimmer

Collecting my luggage, I hurried outdoors

Waiting for the upcoming elevator

Which finally emerged, after traversing all the floors

And out stepped a bloody traitor

Impatiently I brushed him aside to irrupt

Inside, when my flouncing mother began to holler

In my tracks I was stopped abrupt

As she pulled me back inside the home by my collar

Sensing that her fogged son was seeking elucidation

She elucidated, “He looked ash-smeared and one of our ilk

Spotting one while stepping out is a bad omen

So pause for a couple of minutes, while I get you some milk”

Punctuated from time to time, I live through archaic Brahminical

Beliefs, sometimes impacting, holding me at ransom

Never to date have I received any empirical

Evidence, sometimes painless but nonetheless irksome

I never minded the ladies fingers when I expected a feast

On the eve of the mathematics test

Or prostate to elders facing the revered east

While receiving a monetary gift at their behest

I also accept the illogical appendages demanding adherency

In the process, which come naturally concomitant

Such as the random coin to the note of currency

And I will still drink in these minor irritants

But many a time I beseech, in a voice near tragic

Upping the ante, with a cri de couer

Will you give me some bloody logic

And Each time, my plea they ignore

A cornocupia of unconfounded myths

And emetic superstitions reign retrograde

As science and rationality defying faiths

Keep getting passed down generations by the Blue Rinse Brigade

As their rigidity and senescence

Begins to ossify with passing years

So has my patiently inculcated acquiescence

Sometimes to trod the path, sometimes to let it fall on deaf ears

Night and Daymare

I don’t know from where I was coming

I had no inkling as to where I was going

All I knew was my lips were humming

Some crestfallen lamentations of my own doing

I distinctly remember it was on the highway

Not a road cutting thru the city

I was also cognizant of the emotions that outweigh

Bearing heavy on mind, were singing a melancholic ditty

I didn’t care about the speed

I brushed Laggard trucks and lesser cars aside,

However there was one SUV belonging to a similar breed

Who in close heels for sometime drew up by my side

After a gutsy duel of driving skills

I gave in, ahead sped the more robust car

The spirited battle gave me the thrills and frills

But not the lead, Close but no cigar

A good fifty feet now separated the vehicular masses

Making peace with the undoubtedly decisive winner

I snuck behind comfortably tailgating the master

Closely monitoring the gap, determined not to extend the lead

Ten minutes passed without much activity

To my ruminations, I quickly came away

With both motorists in control of the situation, displaying gritty

Resolve to not yield or concede any further leeway

According the knackered accelerator

A deserved pause, ensconced in cruise mode

I flung my worries to be taken care of sometime later

Bombinating the interiors with buzzing tunes of Depeche Mode

When the detestable competitor cocked-a-snook

Suddenly hard-braking totally disloyal

To the enshrined rubric of the freeway driving rule book

To my horror I found myself at the receiving end of the brake’s betrayal

There wasn’t time to probe into the incomprehensibility

The gap narrowed! I began to panic

Forty feet, I had to do something with agility

To conjure up something from thin air, my flailing hands began to fossick

Thirty feet! The car ahead was coming to a stop

I frantically searched for alternatives

Twenty Feet, Ten feet, I squealed a hapless yaup

I had to trigger the last-gasp Putative

Option, the hold hand break

Five feet away! I pull

Too late perhaps, too slow on the uptake

The car crashed, and I was lifted into a mazy lull

Oh what a nightmare! My eyes blued into pallor

I could hear the blasting of my palpitating heart

As I sat up on my bed recoiling with unmitigable horror

Only to realize day and night when viewed athwart

Presented the same situation. One being nightmares

The other when looked at the unavoidable circumstance

I had woven myself into, were inextricable daymares

Sheer acts of my own doing, and blameless happenstance

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!