Wednesday 25 April 2012

Shelf-life 30+?

Men and the antics they go through to have a head of crowning glory, namely hair is an amusing preoccupation to observe. The hair-factor logic is all skewered when it comes to what they desire. Where it grows in abundance, like on their chest and the legs, they will wax it wanting the bald-babies-bottom look for open shirted machoism. And where they  are truly bald, they do comb overs, weaves, extensions, transplants....the works....ending up with Sunny Deol type dead-dog mop hair styles!

Good old Saurav Ganguly had no idea why the stadium was erupting with pandemonium at a recent IPL match when he was playing. Minus his cap he was racing around like a raving lunatic looking like a lab experiment on steroids that had gone terribly wrong! With one side of his hair standing perpendicular to his head, and the other side in varying lengths bobbing about like a Mexican wave with no rhythm; the crowd just got the jeepers-creepers and felt terribly embarrassed for this ageing hero of cricket! The cameras kept giving us eagle eyed shots of his scalp that looked like Frankenstein's head out on a stroll! What an indignity! At home I sat transfixed wondering why no team mate made any effort to get his messy head covered quickly. Finally a colleague came to his rescue with a cap! I think there is nothing more dignified than the acceptance of the natural state of one's body and  embracing  change with a positive attitude  that allows you to be comfortable with age.

Goldie Hawn, on an episode of the Graham Norton show, genuinely looked scary. A caricature of her former self, she kept flouncing her hair and pouting her cosmetically reconstructed lips fish lips in the attempt to look young and sexy! In comparison a Meryl Streep looks enticingly beautiful as she grows older. 

It isn't that vanity doesn't tempt one into fantasies of radical alterations to one's body. But the delight of a fantasy is that it is a wakeful state of dreaming, that allows one to be self-indulgent, and have out of character  episodes in the secret spaces of ones mind. Acting them out however is what becomes the stupid quotient and leads to the lunacy of people believing in myths. 

Celebrities who are constantly under public scrutiny must find it difficult to be themselves. Yet those who have attempted to remain more realistic about how the progress of time alters their physical appearance, lend elegance to the spotlight their receive, like Waheeda Rehman and Gulzar. 

I am always fearful  of putting chemicals on ones hair for protracted periods of time. Peroxides in hair colour and other such chemicals in these products have a slow but detrimental effect over the years. Pigmentation discolouration is a common side effect of frequent users. But then common sense and vanity don't always go together unfortunately. The excessive desire to look air-brush perfect in real life attributes for many to attempt to defy their natural ageing process. Cosmetic surgeries become their life saving priority to feed their feel good needs that most often roller coaster out of control.

I look in the mirror each morning and see myself growing older. I too have many a fantasy that wishes away the truth of my aging body......but with one eye on the clock to get myself into my studio on time, and the other eye on the multitude of things stacked up in my daily routine of living, these fantasies disappear before I can revel in them with self indulgent whimsy! All too soon my day seems over and as I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror way past the witches hours of decency; I am really too doggone tired to bother about air- brush ideals of perfection! 






1 comment:

  1. Nice post! A humoristic approach to the gruesome
    fact that we are all condemned to age in a more or less graceless manner...to mask its various signs by surgical or other techniques is just fooling ourselves to believe that we are young...and we forget that the real elixir of youth is actually the passion with which we love to live!

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