breitling watches

I recently saw a Sunsilk advertisement where a girl with perfectly lovely hair complains to a Sunsilk hair expert about hair fall and dry hair. He casts a discerning eye over her hair and proceeds to offer suggestions while viewers with proper hair problems like me are left to seethe in fury. That’s the problem with television. Even the befores in all the before/after segments look better than your best attempts. Naturally, I felt like throwing a shoe at the television screen.

I’m blessed with hair that falls in that no-man’s land that’s neither straight, wavy nor curly. On good days, it’s tolerably mousy. On bad ones, I look like something that stepped out of a Tim Burton film. The only ones with worse hairstyles than me are Lady Gaga and Indian politicians.

A Guardian columnist once said that every situation that can possibly happen is depicted in Friends, Frasier or Sex and the City. Everyone in these sitcoms seems to have descended on earth with perfectly coiffered hair (Where is the justice in a world where some are perpetually waging mortal combat with their hairbrushes while Jennifer Aniston wakes up from bed combed, gelled and styled to perfection?) but not once do they properly address the imperative issue of hair care.

It makes one believe that hair care, no matter what Aishwarya Rai-Bachchan says about there being one solution to five problems, is a well-kept secret second only to the location of the secret cache of Mamata Banerjee cartoons.
I’ve tried everything from side-flicks to front-fringes to middle-partings but nothing has worked. Finally, I decided to defer to the experts.

I went to a hair salon in Mumbai – the type with revolving doors, mini-skirted beauticians and bills resembling the GDP of a Balkan nation. A man named Antoine, in pants so tight they seemed designed to torture the authorities at the Security Check of a US airport, tended to my locks.

The end result was slightly too bourgeoisie for my taste but there was no doubt that Antoine had the achieved the hitherto unachievable – he had tamed my tresses. They now lay docile and defeated at the nape of my neck. I walked out with my newly washed hair and washed-out wallet and imagined eyes everywhere fixed on my new hair-do.

My euphoria lasted two days and until my first hair wash. I woke up in the morning with a frizzy ball of monstrosity. I looked like an electrocuted scarecrow. My life was a fairytale happening in reverse.

After that disastrous attempt I kept my hair trimmed to what I imagined to be a becoming boy cut. It’s only recently that I dared to grow it again, mostly due to that marvellous invention that’s democratised the previously oligarchic empire of hairstyles – permanent hair straightening. I feel like Frodo after he tossed the ring into the flames of Mount Doom.