Karishma Beauty Saloon

It happens only in India. It's official.

I was walking past Vyapaar Kendra in Sushant Lok looking for a place to shed my locks, which for me normally involves a nice leafy tree of some kind, (The leafier the tree, the less the chances are of bird crap being assiduously massaged into your scalp) when I happened to pass a garish sign board with the aforementioned inscription.

The sign was of the ubiquitous photoshop orgy variety. I smiled to myself. Saloon-salon all the same in India, I thought indulgently, marveling yet again (check out my little note on pepper masala dosa in April) at the orthographic liberties this prude nashun affords itself. I obviously haven't learnt my lesson yet, because it suddenly became apparent to me, as my eye meandered through the numerous gradients and drop shadows, that the badly airbrushed face under the mop of hair soaked in Revlon Red, was that of a man. I almost jumped. Closer inspection revealed a Shah Rukh here and a Fardeen there, cruelly beheaded and firmly embossed on twinkling golden stars.

Curiosity got the better of me and I edged closer to the glass door, ready for any handbags that might be thrown my way. But I needn't have worried because the door was invitingly swung open by a fair skinned Punjabi boy, who I could have sworn was rubbing his chin lovingly in front of the mirror in the last Gillette ad. The latest Hindi film song blared from a Sony Hi-Fi in the corner undaunted by the noisy air-conditioning. Fat men sat in various stages of recline on high-backed rexene chairs and back-brushed barbers in frilly shirts and pre-faded jeans attended to them with blades in their hands, minor Michaelangelos chiseling away at seriously heavy pieces of stone. A blood speckled Ajay Devgan chased a bad guy on a precariously placed TV overhead.

“Haircut and shave saar?” said one dapper Michaelangelo, showing me to the chair right under the TV. Obviously I looked like I was badly in need of both. I politely refused the shave, but asked him to use the 'machine' on my hair since I was in a bit of a hurry. The 'machine' is a clipper that most Indian saloons, especially air conditioned ones , use to deal with frumpy customers whose unexciting demands reduce their dexterous coiffure art to assembly-line work.

He expertly sat me down and reclined my seat and before I could protest, a big colourful sheet with a Kareena Kapoor 'Kambakht Ishq' poster emblazoned on it, was draped on me and fastened around my neck. I was just getting used to this when I realized I didn't like Michael's manners very much.

“Losing hair saar?” he said as the 'machine' conked it for the tenth time. I was about to swear at him but I contained myself. To make matters worse, the clipper was something of a dinosaur and was yanking out more of my hair by the roots than actually cutting it. I decided to opt for the traditional scissor and comb approach before I was rendered hairless permanently by a tactless and insensitive moron.

A little later, once Mike had proceeded to the shaving-the-sideburns-etc stage of the haircut, and I was suddenly noticing bald patches all over my head in dismay, I heard the music in the Ajay Devgan movie above reach a crescendo. Ajay had finally caught the bad guy and was looking a little wan from losing so much blood, but was beating the hell out of a goon twice his size anyway. Film criticism aside, what was beginning to bother me was the fact that the pace of Michael's shaving was moving to the rhythm of Ajay's kick boxing. Resisting Michael's firm grip on my neck to look in the mirror, I glanced at his face and noticed terrifyingly that my barber's eyes were firmly directed at the TV. At one point when Ajay was firmly launched in mid-kick, and two helper goons were queuing up to take their respective hits from his merciless cowboy boots, I felt Michael's razor, which had become super deft by now, shave a little to close to my ear for comfort, and I was forced to break his trance and tell him sternly to concentrate on the job at hand.

I left Karishma's with a halfway decent haircut. In a fit of undeserved benevolence I even tipped Mike for not cutting off my ear. My impending baldness gives me nightmares often though, and those times I really feel like kicking Michaelangelo's ass.

My most recent one night stand. And the first one I’ve ever paid for.

“Trains are for lying down, buses are for sitting up, if you ask me”

That was my peremptory text message to my girlfriend Samira one night a few weeks ago.

I had this insightful thought as I was on my hands and knees straddling an absolute stranger I was due to spend the night with. The absolute stranger, of the male variety unfortunately, was lying on his back and had a bloated tummy and I couldn’t help but make contact with it as I was trying to get to my side of the bed.

“Can I sleep on the outside boss,” I had asked him hopefully, trying unsuccessfully to feign a degree of chirpiness.

But the absolute stranger had just belched, scratched his vast stomach, loosened his collar, and informed me on no uncertain terms that my side was inside.

He had yawned expansively, rubbed his feet together to rid them of granules of dirt from the Paleolithic era, and collapsed noisily on the bed to underline his point.

I couldn’t help but draw an analogy to a massive steam engine coming to a halt as his breath, redolent of sickly sweet paan, gushed out of him with a hiss as he hit the mattress.

I also couldn’t help but draw an analogy to prison.

 “ This is just shady,” was the other text message I sent to my girlfriend Samira that night, as sleeping-giant next to me battled his sinusitis, and I tried to press as much into the wall of the bus as I possibly could.

But this is only the predicament one finds himself in when he is awarded a ticket on a Volvo sleeper, the new purveyor of comfortable overnight transport, and the pride and joy of the private and public Indian road transport system.

This is just an observation I’ve made before; The Indian male, predominantly of a slightly lower socio economic strata, (and I really don’t mean to be top down or patronizing about this or anything) is fairly comfortable with some amount of co-sexual bodily contact when it comes to displays of emotion etc. I’ve seen brawny guys with gold chains, who’ve only just egged each other on in Rocky IV fashion into doing extraordinary amounts of bench presses, walk out of the gym with their fingers entwined almost lovingly.

And these are tough hardened alpha males who have Mallika Sherawat’s orbs almost protruding out of the wall paper on their cell phones, so one can’t even really doubt their sexual orientations.

It’s obviously a legitimate assertion of male bonding, and I suppose one could argue that it is probably homophobia of occidental origin that makes me even notice such a thing.

I’ve tried to attribute some causality to this phenomenon and I came to the conclusion that it probably has to do with the fact that a combination of penury and utter lack of family planning in this country, has forced large swathes of the population into sharing tiny spaces. A typical village family, at least until recently, was brimming with offspring that somehow tumbled into a tiny hut to pass the night. In a highway dhaaba it’s not uncommon to see two guys snoring away cheek by jowl on a khatia, their limbs entangled in tired abandon.

Indeed, even in an urban middle class home the concept of a child’s own room is relatively new and not entirely prevalent.

Men and women though, have always been meticulously, almost creatively, segregated.

Such circumstances, I figured, could very well add up to a phenomenon where males are comfortable with bodily contact of the same sex and are clueless, or repressed in their knowledge of females.

We are a country that are presently trying to raise the bar in our in-house design capability, with a finger on the local pulse and a mind brimming with cutting edge global ideas, empirical design evidence, and ethnographic research. We see evidence of this in Hawkins kitchenware, efficient garbage disposal, purified Ghee and the Tata Nano.

By extension, what I’m trying to say is, and it really struck me that night next to the anonymous stranger, that the undisputed success of the Volvo sleeper in India is an absolute affirmation of my observation of male sexuality. Previously I used to use Abhishek Bachchan’s hair band as a yardstick to propound this theory, but I think the swift, silent, often garish and psychedelic Volvo Sleeper wins hands down.

I love this country and I have to stress that I’ve got no issues about how much liberty in terms of physical proximity Indian culture affords its Jawans and Kissans, but I really don’t know if this kind of product design, (one bed in which two people, anonymous to eachother, just have to fit) is customary anywhere else in the world.

Butter and mashed bananas

Very innocuous title. Butter and Mashed Bananas. Kept saying mashed potatoes for the longest time. I took the title very lightly. When you see it pop up as a search result on google for ‘ Whats on in bangalore?’, one legitimately assumes this is going to be a light hearted play, perfect for weekend unwind- mode entertainment.

As I found out subsequently, butter and mashed bananas are directly connected with the hangman's noose. It’s no less than the oleaginous stuff the noose is coated with that helps you glide smoothly into the other world at the behest of society’s boot!

And here I was thinking it was an English breakfast concoction or something.

It was perfect for weekend entertainment though. I was laughing my arse off most of the play. Hilarious stuff.

Funny as it was, there were some really cool devices that were used and I have to say the play was undoubtedly very cleverly abstracted.

I'm a tad possessive about my weekends and I confess I almost cried when the thespians came on stage with little or no clothes on and stood astride eachother singing something that sounded in between ‘Rang de Basanti’ and ‘I am a Walrus’. The crinkled bedsheet and the cheap pink tub behind them weren’t helping either. The new Jessica Alba flick in town suddenly seemed irresistibly appealing. I'm no philistine, but I confess I get nervous when theatre takes that cruel dive into that sea of the arcane, which it proudly and euphemistically calls the abstract. It's almost like it’s the director telling the audience, “Alright, thank you for coming. Your investment in our tickets at this time of recession is greatly appreciated. Now fuck off and let us do the theatre thing.” Theatre gets quite Emperor's-new-clothesy a lot of the time, I think.

Not butter and mashed potat…er..bananas though.

Abstraction, if it's not done well can really backfire. It can expose the triteness of the thought process like nothing else, and have it come off as naked and laughable and downright silly. In my own area of work, graphic design, you see that a lot.

But here it was all very scientific almost. The attire being non-descript and sparse, was perfect because they were all playing many roles. A cast of three was attempting to pull off a script that involved many many characters. Their threads (or lack of them) were neutral, free of cultural, social or economical nuances.

That aside, being bare bodied helped accentuate the choreography, which was an essential device in the play. It was used brilliantly as a tool for the actors to seamlessly switch from one character to another. They would immerse you in movement and then suddenly, out of the synchronized, symmetrical motion that had hypnotized you, would pop a different character. Normally choreography is a tool one uses to tell a story, or to embellish a story, like in bharat natyam or a broadway musical, but here it was smartly used as a digression.

The choreographic movements were very Indian classical dance inspired. I don’t know if it was intentional but I think it worked to underline the fact that the play was a dig at Indian culture. Plus the ghungroo on the feet added to the percussion soundtrack that was being used to lead up to climaxes.

And I have to mention how adroitly they used a malleable device like a bedsheet to communicate bed, table, noose, mask, gag, frame and a zillion other things. It was flawlessly executed, without a fumble to speak of! It was quite amazing and I’m sure it wasn’t easy. It was as inventive as 'Who’s Line', (the show where everything's made up and the points don’t matter), and the bonus was that it blended excellently with the choreography because of the material’s flowy character.

And, again, I don’t know if it was intended, but there was something very ‘Gandhi’ about the crinkly white sheet that added another layer of satire for me.

The humour was intelligent, with repartees that stuck with you, and it kept the audience hanging on to every word. It took a dig at some odious characteristics of Indian society but didn’t let you wallow in the filth. If I had to narrow down on one central theme it would be hypocrisy, with references to 'dry humping', the indiscernible and ludicrous ways of the Indian censor board and planetary intervention during copulation, among other hilarities.

And the protagonist, a well intentioned man, fighting against the unbelievably cretinous obstacles that the government puts in front of him, is a figure easy to empathise with in this country. Moral policing, one of the themes in the play, is more prevalent than ever today, and I believe this was written in the days before it even hit the mainstream media. In that sense this play was almost prophetic.

So, if you were patient enough to survive my attempt at theatre appreciation, you'll have assumed that the play was a big hit with me. Bacon and Scrambled Eggs is a great play and with due apologies to Jessica Alba, with whom my hormonal loyalties shall always lie, I would recommend it to anyone.

Irresponsible print journalism…

There was a bungee jumping tragedy in Bangalore the other day.

There were no safety nets laid out as a precautionary measure. Apparently there weren’t any ambulances or first aid kits around either.

The newspaper, I think it was the times of India, was screaming blue murder. It was headline news and justifiably the paper was reproachful and condemning in its report. To further elaborate on the gross inattention, there was an illustration of the series of events that led up to the catastrophe, and the times of India, in its final fit of passion and public outrage, possibly to underline its sense of indignation, beautifully rendered it in the form of a cartoon strip!

 The boy in the cartoon almost looked like Supandi from tinkle.

I have to say I’m still reeling from the sense of utter apathy on the part of one of India’s oldest newspapers.

 It’s quite disgusting but one can still force himself to overlook the dramatization of TV news. It obviously hasn’t occoured to them yet that adding a soundtrack to a breaking news story is probably violating a few teeny weeny tenets of unbiased reportage.

But print journalism? Can we forgive it for being so callous and stupid? It has been around in this country for long enough to at least ostensibly report fairly hasn’t it? To have heard of a genre of diagrammatic representation called information design.

I don’t know about you but I would take offense if a caricaturist was taking artistic liberties in rendering the terrifying circumstances of my death.

Pepper Masala Dosa

Have you had it before?

Have you ever come across it in the tattered, soiled menus of your local shanti sagar?

My guess is you haven’t.

My guess it if you saw it, you would, like me, assume it was one more addition to the long list of glorious Indian malapropisms.

So it was with an indulgent smile that I pointed out this particular A1 item on the menu to the bored looking waiter as he explored the insides of his ear with his pinkie. “PAPER masala dosa, one.” I said, almost conspiratorially, half hoping he’d get the joke.

To my dismay, I was reminded peppercorn by accidentally-bitten peppercorn, never again to underestimate the orthographic ability of this prude nashun.