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The Year’s Last Shout: Crowning Glory

Recently I’ve perceived that with each stroke of my comb, a few strands of my hair get uprooted from their hitherto secure ground. The discovery has thrown my wife into a tizzy and she has been frantically scouring the shops across the city and every available pulp health magazine for hair-fall remedies. My head has become a testing ground for a variety of concoctions and potions composed of powdered herbs, extracted oils, minced shrubs, pastified gooseberry and the ubiquitous raw egg (rotten ones serving the purpose equally well according to her theory, and preferable as they work out cheaper). Though I have dutifully submitted to all these experiments – assuming of course that I have a choice in the matter in the first place – my heart is not in it. For one, I believe that all this propaganda about unfailing cures for baldness is a lot of balderdash. Certainly if the delectable Katrina Kaif sells me a miraculous hair-fall shampoo on television with a charming smile on her face, I will buy it, but I will use it only so as not to let her down – and not because I believe in the virtues of the product. Hairfall, I’ve always maintained, is like nightfall – you cannot predict when it will begin, and once it starts, there’s precious little you can do to stem the flow.

Secondly, I’m not really terrified by the prospect of impending baldness; in fact, and some folks may find this hard to believe, I’m rather looking forward to it. And this is not merely some psychological hocus-pocus about keeping a positive frame of mind in the face of impending catastrophe, but the bald truth. Here are my reasons for being upbeat about the whole business:

1)     It will be a permanent riddance to all those nasty dandruff and lice problems.

2)     It will give me the perfect excuse to wear a Stetson like the cowboys of the Wild Wild West, something which has been my dream since childhood.

3)     It’s a widely acknowledged superstition that baldness brings fortune in its wake; certainly if you calculate the amount of money baldies save on haircuts, hair-oils, shampoos, styling gels, combs and hair-color, it is not difficult to give credit to the veracity of this claim. So my life mantra from now on will be: Bald is Gold.

4)     When a woman meets a man for the first time, it is practically impossible for her to size him up. This is what she might say to herself:

“Oh, this man is so good – looking! And he is so smooth and suave. Quite a charming fellow really.” But pretty soon doubts begin to creep into her mind.

“That is all okay,” she tells herself,” But how do I know if he has what it really takes?”

She means his testosterone levels of course, and quite right is she in her skepticism; after all, her future happiness entirely depends on whether the levels of that hormone in the fellow’s veins are upto the required nanogram mark. He may be bulging with muscles all over his body, but that may be merely the result of a judicious intake of anabolic steroids. Now it is a well known scientific fact that testosterone is responsible for baldness in the male. So now if our female protagonist is sensible and well-read, her task becomes much simpler – she just needs a glance at the shiny bare pate of her suitor to correctly surmise that this fellow’s testosterone batteries are fully loaded, and she can look forward to a life of full-fill-ment with him.

To summarize this point in a catch phrase: Bald is balls.

5)     Exploring this theme further, it may be recalled that the moon occupies a preeminent place in romantic art and literature since time immemorial; hence there is every chance that if a woman catches sight of a perfectly round, shiny and barren globe on a man’s shoulders she would be mooning over him in no time at all (though on the cons side it may be mentioned that werewolves might express a similar interest in your pate and your street dogs may start howling the moment they catch site of it).

6)     I will stand a fair chance of becoming a model for quack baldness treatments. Remember the advertisements in magazines and newspaper where they show a sad looking glabrous fellow in one picture along with another purportedly taken 3 months later with an Adobe Photoshop manufactured thick as a jungle mop on his head, the transformation being attributed to some thaumaturgic cure?

7)     I will no longer need an emergency back-up light. I will just walk into a room with my shiny noggin and “Behold! There was light”. No more will I need to hide my light under the bowl, but it shall light up the world.

8)     It will be great for my practice, thanks to the widely held belief that baldness is a sign of intellectualism. My patients will finally see for themselves that I actually have a head on me. And it will be very easy for them to identify me; sample this putative conversation:

Patient 1: I have this problem with my blood pressure; it keeps shooting up like a teen’s todger. Do you have a doctor in mind?

Patient 2: I think Doctoratlarge is the one for you.

Patient 1: Oh, you mean the baldy? Yeah, I guess he is the works.

9)     Considering the appalling amount of time every morning I have to spend on rubbing my hair dry after a bath, I can safely say that I will never be late for work once I become stark naked (before you jump to conclusions, let me tell you that those two words are just synonyms for bald).

10)  Nobody, not even Emraan Hashmi, will ever be able to get in my hair again.

So all my future fellow baldies out there, give a head-butt to all the negativities about the state of your pate. Your bald head is not your shame, but the crowning glory of your life.

Mind Over Matter

Copenhagen Summit: The Talks So Far……

Tiger Tales

Tiger hunting seems to have become legal again. Ever since the Red riding hoods started coming out of the woods with their bad wolf stories, all scribes, journos and television anchors have trained their guns on the poor tiger. Puns on tiger, woods, clubs and holes have been flying thick and fast and people who can’t spell literature are reciting William Blake’s poem by heart. To make matters worse, Gatorade seems to have dropped the tiger from an energy drink commercial, and other sponsors seem to be following suite. And all this just because the tiger decided to have some meat?

Get real folks – tigers have always been carnivorous, and if you decided to uphold this particular tiger as a role-model because of his supposed vegetarianism, then the fault is entirely yours. Besides he has been especially egalitarian in the choice of his morsels – nightclub hostesses, starlets, models and even a porn-star have shared his attention; isn’t that worthy of being a role-model in the land of equal opportunities?

And what is the rationale behind dropping him from an energy drink commercial? In fact, the feats that he has accomplished require considerable energy and verve. Stalking and hunting down as many as eleven females (till reports last came in) is no mean task, and remember this is a game where the prey is often as hungry as the hunter (and one of them a porn-star with a legendary appetite). I think Gatorade made a big blunder in letting him down.

But Tiger needn’t worry, there are many products which he can now endorse, and whose manufacturers would be lining up at his door to get his nod. For instance he would be a big catch for manufacturers of aphrodisiacs, especially as the properties of tiger balls and tiger pricks are renowned in this regard. And India would be a particularly fertile place for him to bag a few commercials with our profusion of capsules and oils to help the male stand erect without shame in the estimation of his female – ‘More Power’ capsules, C P capsules, Rumoherb capsules, Urja oil, Sandha oil, Madrasi oil, Pathani oil, Japani oil (see this post for an especially lucid account of the beneficial properties of this particular oil) and Korean oil, just to name a few.

Tit bits

Most guys seem to have a fixation for the female mammary glands. Show them a half-decent pair in print or on film, and they are sure to wax lyrical over them. I’m quite disgusted with this kind of behaviour from my fellow male members of the human species. Come on guys, there is no need to go bonkers over what are biologically speaking just a couple of modified sweat glands (I’m serious). You can’t be so superficial in your attitude towards women. You just cannot evaluate a female’s worth by the quality of her bosom. That’s absolutely ridiculous and unfair. I mean, you also got to consider her lips, her neck, her arms, her abs, her thighs, and a particularly succulent orb in her anatomy that is also named with the letter ‘b’. Now that is what I would consider a holeistic holistic view of the matter.

Having such advanced views on the matter of feminine beauty, imagine my surprise and dismay when a female friend of mine called them narrow-minded and in fact outrightly boorish, when I happened to expound them to her in a party. She in fact is quite well-equipped in all the attributes which I mentioned in the previous paragraph – the sort of woman who would not be expected to be my friend, except for the fortunate circumstance of her being my batchmate in medical college. She also called me an uncivilized brute and a sensualist philistine to boot.

“Your concept of feminine beauty is pathetically medieval. The true beauty of woman is much more than skin deep,” She said, casting me a look full of loathing.

I quoted Jean Kerr to her.

“I’m tired of all the nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want – an adorable pancreas?” I said, repeating the playwright’s words.

She said that the woman was a traitor to all womankind. She also suggested that her books be burnt in the streets on March 20^th, the International Woman’s day.

“So you mean to tell me that a woman is nothing but her body? What about her brain for instance?”

I was quite prepared to admit that possibility. She herself was a glaring example, having recently published a paper on the immuno-pathogenesis of Henoch-Schonlein’s purpura in an International Journal (incidentally, the only paper that I have ever published is my letterhead). In fact she was a sort of cross between Marie Curie and Venus and could very well be another Belle de Jour if she chose to (though I did not tell her that).

“That’s not the point though,” I reiterated. “If men were attracted to brains, then our heroines and models will be starving in the streets. Can you imagine what will happen to art? Our art galleries would be full of paintings of nude brains and men drooling over their curves and fissures – ‘Ooh, what a lovely calcarine fissure!’ Cleavage will take on an entirely different meaning. Other men would be going into the throes of orgasm over the perfect Langford sequence. And literature would be finished; instead of the face, it would be the quadratic equation that launched a thousand ships.”

“And besides,” I continued, “It won’t be a good idea evolutionarily. I mean, if men were just attracted to brains, beauty would be evolved out of the human race. We would all become blobs with oversized brains and bodies equipped with just the digestive and excretory functions. Is that the future you wish mankind to aspire to?” I swallowed the rest of my rum to wet my throat after this burst of eloquence.

She stood in silence for a while, and I thought I had her convinced.

“A—,” she said at last, “That is absolutely asinine. When will you men grow up?”

She was wrong of course. Men will always ‘grow up’ pretty quickly around a woman like her. But I didn’t tell her that.

How Surgical Skills Are Obtained

The Unredeemed

Not in the whispering groves of academe

could I find myself a shade,

Nor in the pastoral setting of a song

could I sleep heedless in the glade;

Not the crack of willow thrashing leather

on the green, was music sweet,

Nor exhilarating, sweaty play with friends

in the laughing indulgent heat;

Nor later, the professional hustle and worry

was enough to kill the mind,

Nor the power of life and the game of death

much more than a daily grind.

And ever in all my thoughts and deeds

and even in the seagull’s cries,

Remained the memory of your treachery,

And of the contempt in your eyes.

Beastly Beauty

The generously endowed Katie Price aka Jordan has done something for the show ‘I’m A Celebrity’ that has redefined the traditionally glorified relationship between beauty and beast. And sure enough, ever since the act, the kangaroos are hopping around with an extra spring in their steps. And why not; after all, not many Homo sapiens, let alone other mammals, can boast of such attention from the busty beauty. The younger kangaroos are ogling her burgeoning blow-ups hung up on the walls of their mothers’ marsupial sacs, having wet-dreams about similar ministrations to their persons.

The kiwis though are hopping mad. Quite sick of the big-brotherly attitude of the kangaroos and always keen to prove to the world their social equality to the marsupials, they have taken Jordan’s special attentions to the kangaroos as an intentional slight and an affront to their pride. The Head Kiwi has already shot off an angry letter of protest to the producer of the show with the subject: “Kiwis are ass good to eat” and they are now planning to march in large numbers onto his office demanding that Jordan lavish the same attention on them (see illustration). The president of the kangaroos fended off all questions related to this kiwi demand with a diplomatic smile, hinting however that this years’ Cricket Champions’ Trophy final defeat by the kangaroos still rankled in the kiwi national mind.

Meanwhile, the author of the book ‘How to Climb the Corporate Ladder’ has sued the show’s producer, claiming that the idea of the beauty’s feast was lifted straight out of a chapter in his book: ‘How to Get a Promotion’. Legal experts believe he has a good chance of winning the claim.

Katie herself was unavailable for comment. It is known from reliable sources however, that all bottles of mouthwash have disappeared from the shelf of the supermarket in the vicinity of her house.