The Great Indian Partition

Not the one you were thinking of…There’s enough been said and written about it over the last 65 years!!!

The partition I’m going to talk about is the hair partitioning every Indian boy is subjected to from the time he reaches a combable age or when his hair reaches a combable length. For me it was not any different, the routine after an oily head bath would be as follows. Either your dad or mom depending on who is free to carry out this ceremonial execution of determining the line of partition which indirectly reflects your line of destiny too. Actually destiny is also referred to as ‘Thala vara’ in Malayalam loosely translated as ‘line on your head’ while in Tamil it is more generally known as ‘Thalailezhithu’ loosely translated as ‘script on your head’. Guess the Tamilian interpretation of your destiny is more detailed & dramatic while the Malayalee interpretation is purely linear.

A vice like grip holds your lower jaw which leaves the mark of a thumb and 2 fingers on either side of your chin. The next step is to comb all your hair down and the max it will reach is the mid point of your forehead any further you are headed to a barber. Now comes the interesting part, a sharp toothed comb is run right through your scalp proportioning the entire scalp to a 1/3: 2/3 partition. The 1/3 portion is on your left while 2 /3 is on your right. But remember somebody else is facing you and making the decision on this partition. Left for them is right for you and vice versa. They wanted you to be more left brained and hence proportioned 2/3rds to their left while you ended up being more right brained since you had only 1/3rd to your left. Every Indian parent’s aspiration of their children cracking an IIT or at least a private engineering college seat stems from this. Little do they realise that there was an orientation flaw that made children write stupid blogs such as this instead of cracking Fourier, Laplace and Advanced calculus!!!

Well, now coming to the reason why I ended up writing this. I was recently watching a music show on television featuring Shankar Mahadevan who was looking far younger than his age, thanks to his hairstylist who had made all his hair or rather whatever was there to be vertically oriented with help of some wonderful gel I believe!!! This formed a nice façade around the bald spot he sported. My daughter mentioned he looked really cool and when I pointed out to her that his surface area of the scalp was more than mine she refused to believe me. Thankfully an overhead camera shot helped me prove it.

I, for one, still religiously follow the partitioning policy when it comes to combing my hair and I can look very boring. However one morning I actually woke up with very unruly hair and my daughter said I looked cool…and when I rushed to the nearest mirror the ‘hair do’ or rather ‘hair undone’ was pretty close to all the gelled hair styles sported by the gen-next.

I need to really redraw my line of destiny and try and ‘gel’ with the gen-next at least in my hair do.