A ‘hair-raising’ experience

This post is dedicated to my feat of trying to emulate the Great Sir C Pani (aka Mr. Chakarapani, our aasthana barber in Chennai). This feat of mine though, spared me this time and claimed as victim another ‘saga’ citizen of Chennai who is doing his master s here.

The start of this episode can be traced back to a fateful Friday evening after I had visited Aldi (a supermarket). The proximity of the electronics supermarket ‘Saturn’ to Aldi always creates this overwhelming urge to splurge euros on some electronic gadget. And on that evening, a ‘Haarschneider’ caught my fantasy. An hour later, I was taking my first attempt at styling my hair. It was a decent and successful one. Excited, I informed badri(the saga citizen who underwent this visha paritchai) about the new gadget I had bought and it incited him as well I guess. Now excitement in excess dose has an effect similar to a hyperactive monkey that has consumed alcohol. It basically loses it. I was no exception. Soon we were convinced that the next job for the machine must be styling badri’s head.

The paraphernalia was laid out and I was ready for the next assignment. I was confident of pulling off a stylish cut. Soon the right side was done. It looked pretty, except that I had removed a little more than I should have. Soon after starting off on the next side, to my horror, the ‘haarschneider’ started stuttering like a Pallavan bus on the verge of a breakdown and then the unimaginable happened – it stopped. My first thought was ‘OMG. 25 euros lost!’. Worse, there was a half completed cut for badri. Emergency CPR procedures to get the machine alive proved futile. We tried and tried, in vain. Five minutes later, it sprung to life but went kaputt again in seconds. It seemed to die a slow death.

I was speechless to badri’s questioning stare. I rushed through the instructions manual furiously trying to locate the trouble shooting section when I noticed the sentence – ‘Charge the batteries for a minimum of 13 hours before first use’.

Left with a big mess to clean up and no machine to help, I promised badri that I would finish it off the traditional way – scissors and comb. It was a painstakingly slow task, requiring the patience of a 1000 gandhi’s, accurate estimates of the cut off points and more importantly proper execution. To compound problems, there was not much of backup hair left since the machine had consumed much in one go. There was no room for error. I proceeded very cautiously. After forty five minutes, I had still not managed to make the second side similar to the first.

My confidence at an all time low now, I conceded defeat and suggested to badri that the best idea would be to visit the hair stylist the next day to get things straightened out. All this time badri had been relatively cool and I was rather surprised when he replied ‘Well its not so bad. You just need to take some more off here and here and then it’ll be fine’.

I started again and at approximately 1.45 AM, a decent looking ‘Mushroom cut’ was produced. I was somewhat relieved at the end for managing to give a ‘look-able’ look to badri, but was still haunted by the fact that badri was attending interviews for internships at this time. Thankfully, the episode did not have much effect other than giving folks here a hearty laugh and teaching me a lesson I will never forget.

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