Oru Manidhanin Kadhai

Oru Manidhanin Kadhai
Originally uploaded by geeky_rp.

My good friend George Costanza describes a baldist thus:
"A person who does not associate with bald people".

In a recent email conversation amongst a bunch of friends, this whole idea of baldness and how people react to it, came up. Certainly in the US, baldness is not considered as bad as most other places throughout the world (read India). One friend, who went from hairy to no-hairy over a period of five years, had this to say about it. The email is produced here verbatim.

" Atleast for gaining weight we can blame ourselves, but what can we do about going bald ... it is never in our control, so no point in feeling bad. also, being bald and hair(or lack of) is an issue only in India. Here, I have known personally from 95% of girls, nobody gives a damn(thankfully!).

I did some self analysis and psychologically analysed male baldness. we go through 4 psychological stages ....

1. Shock ... when we see the initial receeding hairlines (this happened to me in 4th year)

2. Denial ... we pretend not to notice the reduced hairline and try to hide it by combing accordingly and not even think about it (for me end of 4th year and initial year here in US)

3. Anger ... this is when no matter how much we try to hide by combing hair over or not notice ever increasing baldness, the hair loss has become so much that it will be noticeable. The anger part is a bit compounded by friends/family asking .... "thalaikku ennai thekkaraya illaya? ... en ivlo mudi kotti pochu?" etc etc. Sometimes when guys(mostly Indian since hair is never an issue for guys here) continue to tease we have an angry retort like "amaam mudi kotti pochu, otha adhukku enna ippo?" (for me the next 2-3 years in US).

4. Rejected Acceptance ... It is just there and we cannot do a damn. We painfully realize that we have to live with it. We look at old pictures once in a while and sigh inside. But we also start looking at bright side ... that hair is not that much of a big deal and try to find alternative ways of accentuating our personalities to cover up for a "physical" loss. This is also when we start making sarcastic jokes at our own baldness. (since last year for me)."

Now to make this even more interesting, I am posting 5 photographs from that same friend, capturing the essence of his writing. We had so much fun reading the email with the photos, I am sure everyone here will too. Click on the thumbnail image to see a bigger version in Flickr.

Note: Big Thanks to my friend AP who was gracious and sporting enough to share this image and his own words on the evolution with all of us. An additional thanks to fellow blogger Pradeep for pasting together multiple images to one cohesive pic.