Sunday, January 17, 2010

Balding (an investigative story)

{The post below was written an year back so please forgive any outdated references :) }
It requires just four years in IITR and in some unlucky cases five to completely transform your life (and I’m not talking in terms of salary, recession’s effects are yet to get over). All of us enter the serene and beautiful campus as budding engineers and leave as the future leaders, engineers and managers of this country and abroad as well (which is true only in ideal cases, unluckily ideal students are by now an extinct species). Even though you end up gaining loads of knowledge (doubtful in most cases), there are plenty of things that you also end up losing. And I’m not just talking about the shiny new bicycles that we bought in the beginning of first year, for the biggest tragedy it seems is the loss of the cylindrical filaments growing from the epidermis of or skulls or in simpler words our hair.
Alopecia or the loss of hair is a disease common to most of the junta at IITR. Every day you can see the proof in the form of the clogged drains of the bathrooms on the campus. I agree that there are other reasons of course, but there has to be a link between the fast receding hairlines and swirling muck that we get to see each day. The reasons attributed to this strange phenomenon are several. Plenty of people while discussing this tragedy during the usual 3 am ‘bakar’ session very conveniently place the blame on the shoulders of the draconian early morning professor who forces you to come to class after 8 straight hours of CS and just 2 hours of sleep. On the other hand, others feel that it must be the enormous number of ‘tuts’ that we get and the effort we put into photocopying them that is to blame. The most popular culprit however is our seemingly radioactive water supply, point in favour being that most people hardly lose any hair when at home. There are plenty of other suspects of course but no one knows for sure.
IITians are famous all across the country for being the hub of innovation. Agreed that most of the budding electrical engineers on campus can’t even fix a fuse when it trips and most of our computer engineers face problems while formatting their own laptops but when it comes to cooking up innovative solutions to somehow mask their bald pates, we might just be the international champions. Most people initially start with restyling their hair and opting for what I call as the ‘straw sprinkled on an egg’ look. Later as the problem becomes even more severe and the aforementioned style becomes unfeasible, hair oil and shampoo ads sporting smiling ‘sushmitas ‘ and yoga ‘babas’ suddenly look promising. Depending on their inclinations, most people opt for either baba’s magical babuti or the chance to become another smiling sushmita (the tv ads remember). When even this fails, most people resort to desperate measures, chopping off the few locks that still cling to their bald pates. A recent movie starring ‘Aamir’ has thankfully come to their rescue and all of a sudden bald is the new in thing. The Bhawan barbers are happily shearing the heads of those among the balding who had not dared to take the plunge.
In the end as I attempt to conclude, I just remembered that our friendly ‘behenas’ in Sarojini are also subject to similar problems. How then do they manage to deal with this dilemma? No one’s sporting a ‘Ghajini’ look in Sarojini at least. No one I’m sure has the daring to ask, but we can at least guess. Wigs, anyone!!

1 comment:

dhawal said...

I loved it then, I love it now.... and this post could have been 'in fond memory of Kondy's receding hairline'