at the barbers......

wow....!! finally i'm back to this place.....
Its been a while now, the urge to blog has always been building up but have never found too much time or the patience to put it into practice!! darn it....i'll stop trying to warm up to it and i'll get on with it anyway!!

So, the sequence of events is as this, due to a sudden turn of events, and mind you, this time, unexpectedly and pleasantly for the good, i landed up having what they call and internship! I say its pleasant because every engineer or budding engineer for that matter would manage to get some industrial exposure, which, considering tho obsoleteness, if such a word does indeed exist, of the present day engineering curriculum, does a world of good to the poor fellow! And i say unexpected because after trying everywhere for an internship I finally managed to get one due to a fellow friend's benevolent gesture just when when all hope was as good as lost. Pretty melodramatic you might say, or well, i might force u to believe!!

But the crux of the matter remains that i landed up in (or is it into) the corporate world of LNT Control and Automation in Ghansoli, which unbelievably is an actual place. And this required me to behave in accord with a certain code of ethics and this behaving involved dressing up and appearing decent too. Well most people who dare to know me would quickly point out that appearing decent is way out of the small bunch of things that i can manage with considerable results. Yet, since there was absolutely no way out but to give my appearance such a touch that it would somehow manage to start appearing decent, i decided that that certain touch had to be a complete shave of my beard! This bit of decision making required way too much of contemplation on on my part since many have claimed and rightly so that after a shave its fairly difficult to decide towards which side does my gender lie and due to the heavy difficulty in deciding many decide it doesnt tilt towards either direction, which is worse that it tilting completely to the wrong side altogether, if you know what i mean! Not that anything is wrong with my countenance (when there is no trace of hair on it), but in the wake of all the Abhishekh Bacchans, the MS Dhonis, the Yuvraj Singhs, all of whom sport a stubble, most have forgotten the handsomeness and the decentness that emerges out of a nice clean shave. (That explains why that daring young man no longer manages to go to his office kayaking through the ferocious waters...it is because he's completely shaven..which means he's outta vogue! and so is Old Spice if the nothing above rings a bell!) Still, after considerable weighing of matters I decided that a clean shave is my best bet at maintaining a code of ethics!

Its fairly easy to shave ur own hair, (more so if you are not a woman, and i aint one, which i hope all of u have already figured out!) still with me, i would mostly end up with a hair or two unshaven which gives one a disgusting appearance, not to forget him becoming the butt of all jokes, making one fell like a butt itself. So, it became inevitable to visit a saloon! This course of action had to be carried out on a sunday, a day where getting out of your bed is almost unacceptable to your body. Well it was a grim battle that i had to fight with that body of mine but i manged to get on my feet. However, by the time I did manage to properly get up it was midday and i had to commit the horrendous sin of venturing out into the scorching heat and all for the sake of that miserable shave!

Any barber is capable of shaving ur hair off well, even the ones on the footpath are fairly skilled at that, so i dint have to choose special saloon (another case where our sex has a thumping advantage). I managed to go to a shady one down the road, since it was the closes thing to my house in which men can get their hair cut! I realized my mistake immediately after stepping in as "oh oh janejana" were the first words that hit my ears..of course that was after i took off my head phones which were obediently reproducing "sweet home alabama" being played by the cell phone! I wasnt sure if it was the striking difference in the two genres of songs or the sudden sight of a famous hindi actor taking off his shirt and apparently playing a guitar that numbed all my senses! But there i was waiting for my turn to come and seeing the string of barbers murmuring (one almost pulling off an encore of doffing off his shirt) the song! When i think of it now i feel a quick act of putting my headphones back on would have been very helpful, life saving possibly, but i was way too stunned to perform any sort of action after having been transported into a completely different world. Not that i have anything against it, but the sudden manner in which it was thrusted upon me would have taken the air out of anyone's chest.

Slowly but surely my chance came! Til then i had gathered myself enough to be able to convey to my allotted barber that i shall be needing him to shave my beard. He very kindly brought a cloth and put it across my upper body and equally unkindly tied it across my neck, possibly an attempt to declare who was in power there! I took the hint. I dunno what it is with these barbers but they love to play around with your face. Not at all like ur girlfriend does with yours but a lot like a butcher handles his meat. they happen to grip ur face with one hand and turn it to their liking, if u dont comply they bring in another hand, pass out a grunt, and with some fighting manage to put it in the right position. This 'right position' has many times come to me as stunning cause i personally was never aware of my neck or my face to achieve such unorthodox positions!

Well all that manhandling was too much to handle for me and i decided the only way to get through it was to keep my eyes shut..and comply! Well, any chances of me raising a voice against him were outta hand cause he had his grip firm around that cloth which if would have been tightened any more would have surely strangled me and now he even have a blade in his hand. Its funny how ur barber can easily assassinate u if he wants. Its difficult to imagine how the likes of Barack Obama or Manmohan Singh could ever trust their barber, but then, neither of them really need one, one has hardly any hair and the other has way too many by now to ever bother bout trimming them to size! (With all necessary respect towards both of them ofcourse) I felt a little secure since my killing had absolutely no importance to politics or to the society, though many would revel in the pass of such an event, since then there would then remain absolutely no one in the world who would be capable of talking utter nonsense! Yet, i hope, that wasnt reason enough to kill me, not for the poor old barber at least. That is too much digressing from the main story in which i had duly closed my eyes and that slowly got me drowsy and later got me asleep.

I went into a good sort of trance, where everything was blank, colorless, and there was this overpowering peace...the whole feeling was fittingly relaxing!
But like all goo things, this also had to come to an end, it started with some song intruding into my state of trance....
it sounded like "tum to thehre pardesii.......", that unpleasent song triggered a whole lot of other events which as u shall later see can be classified as equally unpleasant if not more. My state of peaceful, relaxing, blank, colorless trance was broken, no, shattered and my brain nerves were pounding because of the new, unwanted, incoherent garble of words that hit my eardrums not to forget the loud, intolerable, flashy music too! At that very moment i felt a pair of hands almost caressing my cheeks, such a feeling is almost, in fact completely novel to me since there has never been any caressing carried out on any part of my body leave alone my face. (Not that by this i'm trying to make a plea of to be caressed but it is just a matter of simple fact) This caressing made me involuntarily open my eyes, who could not resist to have a sight of that being which had managed to do the impossible! Well only i know the horror that struck me after falling prey to this involuntary action. I was presented the scene of a that ruddy barber staring right at my face almost too close for comfort and it almost made me yelp in disbelief or maybe I did yelp in disbelief.

However, as i was had come out of the trance things started flowing back into my mind. Things such as along with playing with your face all the time the barbers have a tendency to get way too close to it too...(and that to ensure that those one or two hair that would remain left out are completely taken off, so its not act of lust by them. Its simply what u pay them to do.) and they should not be mistaken for a girl not even if what they do is almost too similar to caressing.... !
In a while i had a face which was almost shining with light reflecting from it! It had never felt so clean before like almost all load was taken off it but for that matter it had never felt so manhandled before either! Also, most of the people that met me out of the saloon did voice their opinion that i had managed tilting to the right side of the gender scale, despite of the glowing face! That lone fact made the trip tolerable.!


PS- All this effort was put in to figure out why a frnd loved typing or "why she liked typing as a substitute for her love for typing!" in her own words which is till now absolutely incoherent!