Unbearable Cultivatedness of Being.

Time passes, with all the precision that we come to associate with it. Its gait being ever so slightly hastened with that most meaningless of all farces also known as Daylight Savings Time. So an hour is what we lose (this time three weeks earlier than past years) but with Spring round the corner, the loss is highly excusable. The timing of spring break couldn't have been better erm... timed. At the end of a rather demanding week the respite comes like a pleasant dream after a hard day's work. So I reward myself by mucking about on my bed making that tough call between House and Transmetropolitan. A few episodes followed by nice sleep followed by terrible void (borne out of lack of activities) later, I summon up courage and make that brave move. I decide to shave.

A kid loves to grow up to wear that cool pair of jeans and earn that extra pocket money. A teen aspires to become the adult who can drive and enter a few bars (of course voting wouldn't really be top of his agenda). But ask most twenty year olds and they would love for time to stay right where it is. Male adulthood, the time when that extra slice of pizza comes plastered with the forewarning of fragrant flatulence, and the morning shower points to a bald future. The occasional look at the mirror hoping that the white speck on the scalp is some trick played by light and the grim realization that it is indeed a white speck. The travails of adulthood are well documented, but the one dire truth I eventually come to, is the glaring incompatibility adulthood has with my rather languid disposition. And the symbol of that incompatibility is the daily process of shaving. It is a cruel trick God subjects man to. While adulthood is typically marked by the time when the scalp suddenly decides to go for a stroll, leaving the beautiful hair that it held together for the past 20 plus years for a fall, the face cranks up into overdrive sprouting hair all over. Personally I don't think facial hair necessarily enhances a person's looks, a case in point being the rather clowny looking Big B (What, blasphemy? A white French beard! What was he thinking?). I don't buy the whole facial hair being a sign of manliness tripe. Yes, it is manly, but the manliness is merely limited to the ability to grow it. The process of shaving it all and getting the advertised smoothness is the other aspect of manliness... something your average Gillette ad will tell you.

Like all late teens it was a nice feeling being able to have a moustache only for the thrill to shave it off. But the whole process of face 'harvesting' is okay as long as it is done on a seasonal basis. The problem hits you hard with the dawn of adulthood, when increased facial fertility calls for daily culls. Something that is totally against my inherent inertness. At this point it would be wise of me to apologize for my fertilizer crop-harvesting analogies and get to the point. So diving straight, on an average day I look like those people who have gone through a life changing event and decide to take up Islam in a serious way, a week ago. (No offence meant to the religion, but I am trying to point out to those early days when baby faced Inzamam decided to dispense with his razor for good. And did they take a long time to grow! - which is a totally different issue.) Not everyone can pull off a Hrithik or a John Abraham with unshaven beard (not that I find them appealing), but I still respond to random requests to shave with an 'It's my new rugged look' tripe. It requires one of those flippant remarks to filter through for me to set it in my mental calendar, and on one bright afternoon after much deliberation I decide to go for it, and once I am done shaving, feel relieved that another week can now pass without that dreaded thought crossing my mind.

Ah! The curse of adulthood. While the teens and early adulthood are spent admiring and cultivating the hair on the head, the thirties and forties are spent covering the bald patches and said white specks that are now no more specks. After that one would have given up on cerebral hair. But the one job that remains until death is the daily trimming of that cursed bit of facial hair.

Note: Apart from filing this post under General Rubbish, under which most of my posts are anyway, it is also the first one to be filed under 'Murderous Humor'. Note the use of the word Murderous - signifies nothing short of Vogon poetry, doesn't it?