Fall

The source of contents for this post is a set of notes I had written a while back, when in a different zone, for a mocumentary that I never got around to making.

What does the word 'fall' conjure up in your minds, dear readers? The Fall of Man perhaps, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the beautiful fall season with colorful leaves raining down on a couple looking for a little intimacy. But every time the last image has popped up in my mind, the man has been bald, and that is what 'fall' has eventually come to mean for me - the fall of hair.

Dr. Rohit Bal, the foremost of the has-been fashion designers of India, feels that the rise in MPB (male pattern baldness) has its shaky roots in the evolution theory. Monkeys had hair all over their body and man has evolved from monkeys. Most men (yeah OK leave Anil Kapoor out of this) have lesser hair than monkeys. So, logic says that bald men are more evolved than normal men. This is illustrated in their great survival instincts as portrayed by rumors they spread among womenfolk such as causes of baldness being a byproduct of too much testosterone.

A recent survey of randomly chosen individuals yielded interesting results on the outlook of men and women on MPB. While 98% of the men believe that as long as hair lasts till marriage (the other 2% are still trying to pry open the closet), a whopping 98.1% of the women believe that men should have hair till they are old enough to use Viagra (the other 1.9% are blind). Another important fact to result from this survey was the high-handed attitude of the men with receding hairlines with regard to the already bald men. Balaji (name changed), who has a receding hairline believes that bald men are at the bottom of the dating chain and hopes to loose his virginity before he looses all his hair, thanks to the meteoric rise off late of the cult website shaadi.com.

Dr. Bal feels that there is hope for optimists like Balaji. Here are some very practical tips he told us. The number one method used by balding men to hide their less foliated areas is called 'real estate management'. This involves placing the remaining strands of hair in such an arrangement so as to give the scalp as uniform a look as that of the grass on the other side for these individuals. For those optimists who do not wish to wake an hour earlier for work and manage their real estate every day, Dr. Bal prescribes alarming changes in facial hair with regularity to distract female gazes from the scalp. Limited research that is available on the female psyche suggests that women are intrigued by facial hair since 75% of women worldwide lack this luxuriant growth that men boast of. Other techniques include endorsing Baba Ramdev's method of sitting at lunch tables and rubbing fingernails in a group for no less than 20 minutes every weekday. Another technique is in the R&D pipeline at the moment. There is already a drug called Rogaine in the market which is supposed to replenish hair growth. What the scientists at Johnson's Johnson are working on are the blueprints of the design of a cannon for this product, which may be used by retired social workers in public places indiscriminately showering passersby with the drug. Market research only confirms the great demand for the drug all over the world.

Hope is the only universal truth that bonds men with receding hairlines and bald men together. So thank God for hope. At the end of the day, nothing except hope lasts forever, least of all, hair. To quote a George Bernard Shaw with a receding hairline, "He who has never hoped can never despair".