I should have been careful when I walked into a place containing hundreds of young people - by young I mean people who have barely spend a decade on this planet. They are commonly referred to as children. The problem with children is that they have not yet been corrupted by etiquette. This meant that they did not, usually, sweeten their thoughts. Some of them don't air their opinions but the ones who do, do it with such precision that a person's ego gets a permanent dent. I realize now that I did not have much knowledge of children when I walked into the place and today I am stuck with facial hair.
On the first day, I walked in with a clump of hair above my upper lip. It was not a modest not-droopy-and-yet-not-a-stand-up mustaches but the showy handle bar type of mustache. During my growing years, the terms man and facial hair went hand in hand. But by the time I got to the second half of my twenties, I was tired of maintaining this patch of hair. Also, by then, I did not care much about being a man. So I took it off. It did not make me look any better but it did not make me look any worse either. Fortunately, I had one of those "who cares?" faces and the facial hair did not make any difference (at least not at that point of time).
Since then I wore mustache when I got tired of my empty face and took it off when I got tired of snipping this side and then that to make the mustache seem balanced. I have wasted an incredible amount of time in balancing my mustache! The process of balancing is usually accompanied by the following conversation between the two sides of my face.
"Hmmm! It looks ok."
"Of course not! You are two millimetres longer than me."
"Eh! Is that true?"
"Yes, you are."
"Alright, let me fix it."
"Enough, enough, ENOUGH. What have you done? You have taken five millimetres off. Look at us now. We are not balanced. This is pathetic."
"Oh no! That nonsensical clump of hair was always indisciplined. They creep into the nose surreptitiously in the night and the poor fellow wakes up sneezing."
" Give me the scissor. Let me fix this"
"Oh no! You cut too much."
"No! Its Ok."
"Nonsense! We look so out of balance."
"No. It is probably half a millimetre or so. It is not bad."
"Forget it, its terrible but I don't have the patience to fix it."
Every time, I shaved this happened. As a result, once I got into my thirties, I decided to take it all off. Let us go clean. Life was pleasant - no more balancing or wincing at the imbalance one witnesses in the mirror. Apply the cream at all the hairy spots on my face and swish it all away.
As years went by, I realized that I have a fickle mind. When one is young, it is difficult for a person to look at oneself as anything less than perfect except at those times when the question "why was I born?" (not the existential question but more a question raising out of desperate sadness) runs through one's mind . But as one gets into middle age, the perfection bubble breaks and one gets more into the why-was-I-born mode. I believe this results in the often abused phrase of mid life crisis. I being an average human being went through the same phase and decided to grow a beard.
Growing a beard has its advantages. For a start, it hides your face and so you can pass off as a person with a palatable face. One can twirl the mustache and do something with the hair above the head and pass off as a poor cousin of Kamalhassan in Satya. Second and more importantly, one does not have to shave. Plenty of advantages here - saving money, saving time, saving water, not seeing one's face in the mirror for more than 20 seconds a day. It was amazing. I loved it.
Life and everything it encompasses is like a coin - if there is a head, there will be a tail (Annu Maliked from "Boss engira Bhaskaran"). The coin called beard has all the advantages mentioned above on the heads side. On the tails side, it has uncontrollable itch and unruly hair. I have never understood the reasons for the itching of the beard. You live life oblivious of your beard and at 5:45 pm just as the cup of black coffee reaches your lips, the spot right at the centre of your left cheek starts itching. You place the cup down and scratch the spot lightly. Fifteen minutes later, eight of your ten fingers are busy scratching every hairy spot on your face (as an aside, I just realized we almost never scratch with our thumbs - our thumbs are scratch-proof). I have the ability to live with this itchy aspect of my beard for about three weeks.
I never go from a bearded face to a hairless one. Instead I stop at the almost handle bar mustache stage. It was during one of those in-between phases that I walked to the place with the hundreds of children for the first time. My mustaches usually do not for last more than three months. So three months later, I took it off and went clean. I walked confidently into the place without realizing that I was walking into a minefield. By the end of the day, my self confidence was crushed. I went through all sorts comments. None of them pleasant.
"You look terrible"
"Why did you do it?"
"Don't talk to me. I don't want to see your face."
"What were you thinking?"
"You looked much better earlier." This one is the worst. If I really looked better earlier, why was I not told so. But I can't blame them. How would they know how terrible I would look once I took away the clumps of hair on my face? The list goes on.
The first (and the only) time I went clean, the phase lasted three months. For nearly a year now, I have maintained a beard. Sometimes it looks like a scrub forest and at other times it looks like a well manicured lawn. The latter is also not liked by the small people. But it is usually not as brutal as the ones that a clean surface draw and so I remain bearded.
I end this pointless rant with a famous quote by Nethan Yaaro.
Bear the beard with grace
For
Bare is a beard-less face
That has to
Bear the brunt of words with no grace
Making even a
Bear unable to take it on his face
To avoid ending this write-up at the end, I am throwing in a video link to a song by one of my favourite groups Faith no more beyond the end of the write-up. The song is called "Midlife crisis" and according to Wikipedia, Mike Patton says it has nothing to do with midlife crisis but about Madonna. It was released in 1992 and so maybe it is about Madonna's midlife crisis.
Hair story.
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