So yes the Urban Company guy came and gave my head its sane look back. Nothing is more annoying than waking up in the morning and seeing your overgrown hair looking like this.
I guess that’s what being grown up is all about. You can no longer tolerate Ustad Zakir Hussain like hairdo on yourself. But it wasn’t always so. While growing up, I put my hair through a lot of trials and tribulations to look cool.
The first 18-19 years of my life I couldn’t do much because of my dad’s ‘my house my rules’ rule. Since he was the provider, he dictated how my hair looked; which is the case with almost all Indian families.
If there was ever a template for an Indian hairstyle then this was it; find a partition and comb the hair on either side of it (like some sort of red sea parting but with hair). The hair on either side was always in an 80:20 ratio. And the partition was never to be crossed by any unruly hair. They were held in place by a spell called the Indian Hair Oil. Indian parents would apply a generous splash of oil (mostly home-made or parachute) and there it was. The look that gave rise to the term ‘champu’. But even hairs have rebels. There will always be a few strands at the upper end standing in defiance.
Likewise I too rebelled against my parents; and as always the rebellion was quashed by my dad. It was the 90s and a new hair style gathered rage among all guys. The 'Katora Cut' or 'Tapeli Cut'. It looked something like this.
And like all things naive, I quickly believed that barbers would put a Katora on your head and fashion the cut. Hence the name. Well the barber didn’t do anything of that sort. If anything then he was overjoyed because he could now cut less hair for the same price.
I reached home hoping to live a normal life. But getting through the security check that was my dad was never easy. My father looked at me in silence. He was expressionless. He grabbed my head without affection and rotated it to get a better glimpse of the latest rage in Indian haircut industry. If his touch was any indication of how pissed he was, his eyebrows which converged downwards and formed a V confirmed it. But he didn’t say anything. He grabbed me by the arm and took me straight to the barber; no words were spoken between the 3 of us. The barber made me sit on the chair and proceeded to give me my regular cut. No way was my dad going to be robbed of money for a job half done.
But then came college. And with it came life in a hostel. It meant that I could experiment with all the cuts that the Indian haircut industry could possibly come up with. But this industry has one major flaw. It is trained to cut hair in very limited templates. It is similar to the hotel industry that caters to the middle class. The menu might say Continental and Italian. But the chef can only prepare ‘tandoori roti, butter paneer/veg kolhapuri (which I believe is a sham as all sabzis with veg as prefix are more or less the same), dal fry and jeera rice’.
I remember that I had come home for the weekend. I decided to get a haircut, and asked the barber to give me a crew cut because Lakshya had just released and Hrithik played an army guy, and girls loved Hrithik, and I for some reason believed that a similar haircut will also alter my face to resemble Hrithik’s.
I remember that day clearly. I specifically asked that idiot if he knew how to give a crew cut. His confidence when he nodded in the positive could only mean that Hrithik came to him every month for his haircut. And the scissors snipped and snapped. The barber was lost in concentration. If he were to die the next instant, my head was to be his swan song. Given his seriousness, girls were going to line up to date me the moment I reached college. I paid him and walked home.
God chooses the most embarrassing of ways to convey that you have messed up. When I reached home, one of mom’s friends was sitting on the couch. I greeted her. She responded as well. But she seemed to be intrigued by my presence. She didn’t smile but looked at me with concern. After I had freshened up and the lady had left, my mom came up to me and said,
“What the hell did you do to your hair?”
“It's the latest style”
“It's pathetic”
“You wouldn’t understand”
“Why do you always embarrass me in front of people. The lady asks me if you were sick or dying of some disease.”
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