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Mooch nahin toh kooch nahin

Where did all the facial fuzz go? And what for? Are we man enough to bring our body hair back?
Jatin Sharmaby Jatin Sharma

Waiting for a friend at Bandra station, I overheard a conversation.

A deep voice next to me said, “No Mark, I can’t come for the movie because I have an appointment at the parlour.”

‘Parlour?!’ I wondered, turning around to look at this person, who I thought must be a girl with bad vocal chords. But this ‘parlour’-going person was a young man. He told his friend that he had to get his eyebrows done, which made my eyebrows first shoot up, then come together.

I continue to be surprised, but I shouldn’t be. I’ve seen (and heard of) umpteen men regularly undergoing facials, eyebrows trims, manicures, and – horror of horrors – waxing. But apart from wanting to get fairer skin that glows, most men are waging an all-out war on body hair. The moustache, the chest hair and the rugged look are all going out of the window. Even the famous quote, ‘Mard ko dard nahin hota,’ is being replaced by ‘Do taangon ke beech maaro agar, dard nahin toh mard nahin.’

A moustache has been considered a mark of a man for time immemorial. Earlier generations of Indian men had lovely moustaches that were their pride and joy. It what made them the men they were, it was their ultimate masculine symbol. Even today, a gloriously-moustachioed man is the cynosure of all eyes. But a lot of previously-moustachioed men are now mooch-less – me included. We could say it’s a healthy trend, what with facial hair breeding God knows how much bacteria and with one’s food getting stuck in all that fuzz.

MARD campaignBut despite all our claims (or pretensions?) to metrosexuality, despite our clean-shaven faces and waxed chests and arms, the perception of a manliness still stubbornly holds on to facial hair as the ultimate male symbol. Recently, even Farhan Akhtar used the moustache motif to promote his MARD campaign – everybody supporting the campaign wore a mooch.

It’s probably none of my business, but the whole anti-hair thing freaks me out, waxing in particular. I continue to be secretly amazed at the men who walk into saloons asking for not just a haircut, but bleaching, waxing, eyebrow trims and pedicures. I asked a few of these men about to get waxed about wanting to get waxed in the first place, and all of them shrugged, “I just don’t like hair on my body.”

I am also quite baffled by macho fairness creams. “Mard hokar ladkiyonwali fairness cream kyun?” says a popular ad, but dude, if you want a fairness cream, be man enough to use a woman’s fairness cream if that’s the best you can do.

And don’t even get me started on pink shirts and green pants for men.

A few men I know take longer to get ready for a night out than their wives. It’s almost as if men in the country have suddenly realised that they can primp and buy fashionable clothes and the best skin products as much as women can, and are trying to make up for lost time by doing everything they can to not be like their fathers and uncles.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like this behaviour, it really creeps me out. I guess I still bear the legacy of a lost generation of Indian men, whose attempts at beautifying themselves started and ended with them getting a haircut. Most of them would blankly wonder what blackheads were supposed to be, and be quite aghast at the idea of getting a facial done. Several fathers still look askance at their sons’ clean faces, studded ears and long hair, and at some level, I know exactly what the older guy with the sad eyes is thinking – Mooch nahin toh kooch nahin.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up he will be like everybody else.

Some celebrity moustaches:

(Pictures courtesy www.salford.ac.uk, www.bollyworm.com, fashion.ozg.tv, www.mensxp.com, articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, in.lifestyle.yahoo.com, www.indiamike.com, rediff.com)

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I love Monday

Why do we hate Mondays? Is it just the thought of going to work or is it something even deeper?
by Jatin Sharma

For the first time ever, I think I can claim exclusive rights to the title of this column.

Because this is an exclusive thought.

Come Monday, and there’s a deluge of email forwards talking about how people hate Mondays. There are scores of posts on social networking sites describing how Monday should be ticked off the list and how much they hate it. It’s like Monday is this monster that devours entire populations of people.

If Monday was a person, he/she would have felt really bad, almost to the point of being suicidal. For no reason at all, Monday bears the brunt of collective hatred as the work week begins.

Why do we hate Mondays, though? It can’t only be because we hate having to push ourselves out of a mini-break mood over the weekend to go to work. Or is it because we don’t like our work much? If it’s the latter, it doesn’t make much sense: do we realise that the work we do on Monday, and on the days after that, is what gives us enough money to spend on the weekends in the first place?

I think we all hate Monday not because it’s the day that starts off another work week, but because we like to waste our time (the way we do on  weekends) and continue wasting time till such time that we are not actually forced back into work. I’ve seen several successful individuals working hard and with equal passion, whatever day of the week it is. I can’t imagine Sachin Tendulkar waking up in a grump because he has a match to play on Monday. At his age, even Amitabh Bachchan seems upbeat every day, working whether it’s Monday or not.

Is it because these two gentlemen really love what they do?

Lots of people are by now armed with the excuse that Sachin and Amitabh don’t have to brave public transport to get to work, and they have so much money already that they need never work in their lives ever again. You are right, but that situation exists now. At the start of his career, Sachin wouldn’t sit at a desk counting the money he made after every match. Amitabh Bachchan was rejected as an All India Radio announcer – a job his heart was set on. But that failure didn’t hold him back, and see where he is today.

We’ve forgotten what our parents kept telling us: Work is worship. That work is closest to Godliness. That work is what defines us and what we will be in life.

Hating Monday is surely not going to help anyone. I was resentful of Mondays, too. But I realised that I really loved my job. Sure, for a lot of people the thought of going to work is awful. Many people have a bad boss, a bad salary package, bad working conditions. But the trick is to still love your work, and love it wholeheartedly, at least while you’re doing it. If you keep telling yourself, “Things are not perfect but I still love my work,” your resentment towards Mondays will disappear. You won’t even feel so elated going home on Friday.

If you shift the hate and turn it into love (or even like), Mondays will be something that you start looking forward to. Mondays will be the reason you exist. I love my Mondays because I love the thrill of starting a new work week and taking new challenges head-on. Sure, I love being happy on the job but I also embrace the moments of sadness that sometimes come with it.

So on this lovely Monday, tell yourself this: “I love Mondays. I love my life. I love me. And I love my work.” Say it often. Say it and believe it.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everyone else. 

(Pictures courtesy blog.theshuttergypsy.com, iamtantra.com)

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You are a terrorist

Terrorism doesn’t start with the picking up of a gun. It begins with mentally slotting people on various small fronts.
by Jatin Sharma

It might shock you to hear this, but it’s true. You are a terrorist. You have been contributing to terrorism in one or more ways knowingly or unknowingly.

It seems to me I am meeting a lot of terrorists these days.

What really is terrorism? It is an act of creating terror and feeding people’s mind with fear.

And you are contributing to it in many ways. The first step of supporting terrorism is when we, as individuals, try deciphering a person’s origin the moment we get to know his last name. It is the favourite pastime of an average Indian.

“Oh, your name is Mark Wesley. You are a Catholic?” you might say.

“No, I am a Protestant,” he may answer.

The moment we hear a person’s name, we get all excited. Like a person is a puzzle presented to us, and that must be solved. And as if we are not foolish enough to divide people in terms of Muslims, Sindhis, Sikhs and Parsis, we go a step further and say East Indian, Goan, Dalit and what not.

Let alone this sport of naming and categorising everyone in sight, we even throw out silly taunts when we celebrate festivals or watch matches. Have you ever gone up to a Muslim friend and asked him if he is supporting Pakistan when the cricket match is on?

Aren’t we helping terrorists – the bomb-weilding kind – become more powerful, for these kinds of statements make it easier to brainwash people later?

We are basically supporting terrorism as long as we keep dividing our people. We get amazed and make it a big story when a Muslim hosts a Ganesh at his place during the Ganpati festival. If you are a mediaperson who prints such stories to show that India is a land of ‘Unity in diversity’, you are a terrorist. Why does it shock you if someone wants to believe in a God without calling that God Allah or Ganpati?

The irony of the matter is that God has become a divisive name in today’s world. Even if you think you are the most reluctant fundamentalist, think again. If you have ever gone out to show the world that your celebration of a particular festival is better than any other religion’s celebration, then you have reiterated the divisive mindset.

If you still disagree, listen to this. The moment you go, “Patil is Marathi, Shah is Gujarati, Kapoor is Punjabi, Motwani is Sindhi, Batliwala is Parsi, Sheikh is Muslim, D’Souza is Catholic,” you are supporting terrorism, for you are segregating people in your mind. You are giving them an association that might not actually be true. Your mind is that of a terrorist, that automatically relates one person to be a part of a larger group, and you believe that group to be representative of a certain kind of behaviour.

More examples of daily terrorism? Sitting at a table and acccusing someone of being a miser as he is a Marwari, or calling a loud mouth at work a Bengali, or a show-off neighbour, a Punjabi.

When was the last time a person’s name was just a name to you? Or the last time you came across an unusual last name and didn’t waste your and his time asking which part of the country that person belonged to?

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

(Pictures courtesy o.canada.com, indiadeific.blogspot.com)

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‘Hoarding’ the city to ransom

Nobody wants to know which politician’s birthday is today, or if politicians remembered us during festivals. So why the hoardings?
by Jatin Sharma

Today I saw a very strange thing.

A developed city like ours is forever marred by thousands of advertising messages around it. And the endless in-your-face promotions are just one reason. The actual reason is that people have a lot of purchasing power in Mumbai, and hence, thousands of hoardings adorn the cityscape to draw buyers in.

But does the city really need thousands of useless messages? Most of us are already aware of where we need to go to buy stuff, instead of looking at five foolish hoardings telling us the same. But my grouse is not even with the hoardings that are ads for products or places – I am really annoyed by the people who claim that they want to make this city beautiful and better to stay in, but who are the first ones to deface it with hoardings and banners: our politicians.

The politicians of this city, who argue that migrants are making Mumbai ugly. These same politicians try to portray that they are true Mumbaikars, who have always ‘cared for’ and who have been ‘sensitive’ to the needs of the city.

Thanks to Photoshop and thousands of chamchas, every nook and corner of the city has been plastered with mindless political agendas. And it’s not just the ‘Happy Birthday’ messages on these hoardings that I take issue with. As I said at the start of this column, today I saw a very strange thing – a hoarding that carried a Happy Birthday message for a politician’s dog in downtown Mumbai! Funnily enough, the dog went through a photo shoot too, as the pooch was wearing sunglasses in the picture.

How does wishing a politician’s dog on his birthday align me, a citizen, with that political party? Like, really? What is so special about this dog? Does it go out and do public service with its master? Does it do election campaigning? Does it attend civic meetings and vote in favour of important measures?

And this is not the only example. What about the rash of hoardings wishing people during Ganesh Chaturthi, Ramazan, Ambedkar Jayanti? Don’t you think these hoardings instigate communities against each other with divisive ideas?

Every hoarding seems like a burn mark on the skin of the city. A city that is progressive in spirit still houses these political factions that promote yesteryear political agendas only to remind people of issues that should be last on their list. Half of the times, these hoardings feature youth leaders that no one knows and no one cares about. Some of them even have all the photos of family members. I continue to be puzzled by hoardings that have a giant hand in the centre and the words, ‘THANK YOU MADAM’ emblazoned on it, or a lotus that supposedly stands for ‘HINDUTVA KI PEHCHAAN’ or even ‘EK TA TIGER’ for other big cats.

Seriously, who are these guys kidding? Are their photoshopped mugshots going to make any difference to those forced to look at them? If the hoardings broadcast some sound issues – like recent public works done in an area – would they make any sense to people, and even then, a small banner displayed for a day or two will suffice.

And to add the woes of the public, the rate to put up hoardings is an amount that literally anybody can afford, so putting up hoardings is possible for every aspiring politician.

And what is the Government and BMC doing? The media focusses on this issue sporadically, after which the BMC pretends to take some action against illegal hoardings, but things go back to the way they were in a few days. The Government needs to impose a code of conduct for political parties, where pushing private agendas in a public place – like wishing somebody on their birthday via a public hoarding – becomes a cognisable crime.

If we say nothing, even a politician’s dog’s birthday will become an important civic issue. Let’s not allow somebody’s birthday to feature on our cityscape. And let’s not fall prey to their fake Ganpati, Ramazan and Ambedkar Jayanti wishes, either.

Dear politicians, how about listing what work you’ve recently done? Or what work you are currently engaged in? How about telling us how much of our money you’ve utilised for us? How many of our grievances you’ve solved? And how about not putting your ugly faces on huge hoardings to make these announcements? If you’re working for the people, your work will automatically be your biggest advertisement. Think about it. And don’t announce what you’re thinking about via a hoarding.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

(Pictures courtesy Kunal Bhatia, www.whiteindianhousewife.com, www.indianexpress.com)

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Back to cool

Jatin Sharma yearns for a simpler time when our society was seriously cool, in every way that the word implied.

‘Cool’. This word has managed to grab the youth. Everyone wants to be ‘cool’. If someone commits a mistake; he is ‘cool’ about it. If something bad has happened to someone; he has to be ‘cool’ about it.

Premarital sex? It’s ‘cool’ to believe in it.

Live in relationship? It’s ‘cool’ to experiment.

Abuse an elder? ‘Cool’ if it was his fault.

But this ‘coolness’ makes me think. Are we ‘cooler’ than we should be?

Being cool is often described as being modern, something that a rebel does. But it may become problematic if we equate being cool with being desensitised, dead inside.

It is probably a reflection of the times we live in that we are cool with everything – an earthquake that shakes the neighbouring State to its foundations, a person on the street who met with an accident while we watched the car that struck him zoom away, a person who announces on a social media site that he is about to kill himself, a long relationship breaking up; with everything that should normally cause us to be really disturbed, but which doesn’t affect us for more than a minute.

Earlier, the incident of a bomb blast anywhere in the country would shake us up, but now we sit in front of our TV sets with our dinner and watch the visuals of carnage play on loop. We are also ‘cool’ with journalists jeopardising sensitive operations, and we don’t directly protest their actions, choosing instead to make fun of that journalist on social media.

I wonder – has our quest for ‘cool’ killed off every last human emotion in us? Recently, a ‘cool’ person that I know had to say this of the second big Delhi gangrape after Nirbhaya, that has had the country talking about the safety of little girls – “Rapes just keep happening, and the people are now bored. Woh Nirbhaya ke time pe ho gaya, now it’s boring to do that activism again.”

Because of this ‘coolness’, we are a generation without a spine or feeling. All we do is talk a lot about what others should do. Heck, we speak about stopping corruption but it is so ‘cool’ to be able to arrange liquor on a dry day. Even as we become smarter and acquire the latest gadgets the moment they hit the market, our sensitivity to others is dulled by our total indifference and lack of awareness.

I loved the fact that the earlier generation of parents were so ‘uncool’, their children would tremble if they did something wrong and automatically toed the line. But parents nowadays, probably in a futile attempt to reach out to an increasingly remote generation of ‘cool’ kids, are also trying to be cool, even doling out money to their children to buy exam papers.

I miss the time when our society was seriously cool – people stood up against wrongs and told it like it is. Our country had some absolutely cool freedom fighters and revolutionaries who would devote everything for a cause. We have now forgotten that helping others is cool, studying sincerely is cool, getting a job on merit is cool, respecting all elders is cool, and being able to tell the difference between right and wrong, whatever the compulsion, is very cool – everything, in fact, that constitutes humanity.

For now, I’m trying to make my peace with a distorted definition of ‘cool’ – where getting away with a crime is cool, where doing drugs is cool (but getting caught is not), hitting a person because he/she didn’t agree with us is cool, where being a total pig is cool as long as you have a sense of humour about it.

(Picture courtesy xn--80aqafcrtq.cc)

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A grim police story

We’re currently seeing a weird kind of policing, where those trying to help are harassed, and criminals are allowed to get away.
by Jatin Sharma

The Indian definition of a ‘Government job’ is a ‘job in which a person retires and cannot be fired from.’ I could extend this definition by saying that in our country, a Government job is one in which a person is not expected to work much and is allowed to behave the way he/she deems fit.

The problem in our country is that nobody ‘dismisses’ a Government employee. At the most, they are only suspended.

We fear those people that belong to a policeman’s family, or a politician’s, or a Government babu’s. However, recent events have shown that if we must fear policemen, it is not because they can instill fear in us simply by being policemen. The rape and torture of a five-year-old in the country’s capital was followed by the terrifying news that the policemen who the girl’s parents approached for filing an FIR tried to dissuade the parents against filing a complaint. Instead, they asked them to accept Rs 2,000 as a bribe for keeping quiet about the incident, and to go home and thank the lord that their daughter was still alive.

No wonder nobody fears the police in our country. The cops don’t want to file an FIR, choosing to let the biggest of crimes be swept under the carpet so that they are spared the trouble of having to investigate them. They can stoop so low as to offer bribes to victims’ families. And if that isn’t enough, they also push and slap protestors.

And for all this ‘ethical’ policing and ‘sensitivity’, what does an errant ACP get? At the most a transfer, after a suspension.

I am writing this piece from Delhi. A car picked me up from the airport, and I soon started chatting with the driver of the car. This driver was of the opinion that the Delhi Police was in a much better shape 10 years ago, because the Force knew how to control people without resorting to outright assault. “But now they are no better than criminals,” he said. “After the Delhi rape (of December 2012, when a medical student was gangraped in a moving bus and left to die on the street), the police started checking vehicles at night. They said it was to increase security. But the checking was done to make money – you had to pay Rs 200 if you wanted to leave without any harm, whether you had done anything wrong or not.”

I asked if Delhi wasn’t insensitive as well, as people didn’t stop to help the rape victim and her male friend. The driver said, “People didn’t help because the police are lazy.” I asked him what this meant. He said, “If anybody had helped, the police would have caught hold of those people who brought them to the police station and harassed them, as they would have to start an investigation.”

What an idea, to think that people are unwilling to help victims of a crime because the police will make them suffer for helping! Of course, this is true of most States in India – how often have we heard cases where people did not report crimes because they feared the police harassing them unduly?

What kind of reverse policing are we living with?

It is an understatement to say that the image of our police needs a drastic makeover. But there also have to be shifts in other duties the police carry out routinely – first and foremost, they should be taken off security duty for VIPs and politicians, because their first duty is to protect the common man. And who says that to implement the law, the policeman has to be a rude, unnecessarily tough person? Our cops need to be friendly, approachable and willing to help in any situation.

Our Government and our policemen have forgotten that the first step in a democracy begins with a strong police force that can effectively ensure that the country’s laws are being followed. Most importantly, there should be the harshest punishments for those cops who are found guilty of dereliction of duty – a mere transfer for a cop offering a bribe to a victim or attacking a civilian, is a laughable ‘punishment’.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

(Picture courtesy theatlantic.com)

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