Bad Hair Life

Bad hair day is what you'd have heard. If there could be a lifetime grievance award for worst hair, I would win it thumbs down. Bad hair is not a lifestyle issue or a style faux paus. Its a handicap of hair raising proportions.

Never did I worry more about this curse than when I was going to go on a blind date.

Note to wife and other affected parties: Date to me means nothing more consequential than a method to measure chunks of time or something as boring as that.

Note to the dates that I had been out with: Call me! My new number is 97*** ****5.

Getting back to the topic, it was a blind date competition in Saarang, our insti's mega cultural fest. One who has the most creative line for an absurd question gets to date a girl. Your's faithfully, cracked the most creative line of that day and up I went to the stage, all glee and macho!

Next to me was a girl personifying an hour glass gone wrong in the middle. So she was more like a burette than anything else. Unlike her, the fatty entrapements beneath the epidermis were limited only to my brain and I was in shape. But to her, something else mattered. The girl flatly refused to date me saying in front of about 100 frustrated souls that my hairstyle is so screwed up that it wont be cool to date me (my fcuk beach shirt and clever lines notwithstanding).

I did a strategic withdrawal without causing visible upheavals, reserving all of those teary traumas to my hostel room.

Circa 1995 - I was popularly called in school as "Springkuth thalaya" (Springy head) - a rather uncouth reminder of my place in the class of boys who vie for the girls' puppy love. Few curling sessions, visits o hair straighteners in college days didnot yield much result.

In the meantime, one of my experiments with brylcream aiming for an italian mafia look, left me with a thankfully shortlived name "Chinna Goundar" - A popular vijayakanth character that sported castor oil laden long hair combed backwards leading to a small oil spring running down through the back of the neck.

Amply humiliated and simply tired of unwanted attention from unkind blind dates, friends during various formitive years, I decided that a sharp and short military look is what it takes to keep a check on the terminal handicap. So suddenly I started looking like Lt.Col.Ashwin Ramasamy in plain clothes.

The problem however was that the girl-types kept a safe distance from me thinking I could be a future wife-beater, with that stern looks. The extra nice and "let-me-comfort-you-with-a-lullaby" approach you see me in, all these years is a lingering byeproduct of having to practice sweet demeanor to keep the girls coming and to ensure cosmic balance of dating boys and girls.

After a few years of perfect military cut and complying hairline, one fine day last year, waves started appreaing in the hairline near the forehead, resembling embarrassingly close to 1960's Shivaji and MGR hairstyles (minus the pencil moustaches).

Though I am married now and hence there is no way my wife is going to reject an outing citing my uncool hair, my primal instincts tell me that I should keep options open and hence the hair, as closed and organized as possible.

Any suggestions that are tried and tested?