In Defence of Bald Men

"Tu Ganja Ho Gaya Hai"

Narayan sent me a deeply poignant message last night. He had just met Sachin Jain, one of our engineering batchmates, after a couple of months.
“Yaar, I am very sad. I just met Sachin and he said Narayan, tu ganja ho gaya hai. Not ho raha hai, but ho gaya hai”.

Narayan had been hearing that “ho raha hai” for a long time now. Not only had he been hearing it, he had been saying that to many others too – including me. It is like one of those things that people like us universally bond over – a smoke, a drink, girls, approaching baldness and paunches growing at the pace of an adolescent kid. Like one of my friends put it, “shrinking topline and exploding bottomline”.

The Many Faces of Baldness

Baldness comes to men in many ways. The most graceful of them is the receding frontier. Akshay Khanna is a famous example. In fact, for some lucky dudes it serves as a heightened forehead.

And the worst is the shiny spot that springs up like a desert in the midst of an oasis. That is the kind that can’t be hidden, can’t be camouflaged, can’t be modified or mollified.

If you look at the top-view of a male head you will notice a round spot where the back of the head seems to stop to climb, and the skull starts sloping in a convex to end in a forehead. All the hair seems to grow out of that single spot in an expanding spiral. That spot is the epicenter of this center-baldness.

It is like drying out the source of a river, like choking the water supply of a city.

It is like hitting in an enemy in the balls – no balls, no more kids to carry on the struggle. Its like a siege – the enemy is not allowed to replace resources. When one falls, you are irretrievably one less. Death comes as a calendar – an intercalary death. Each day you rip off one page, cross off one date, and brush off one more strand; knowing there are only a limited number of pages, a finite no. of dates, just that much more hair left. It’s a remorselessly losing battle.

Men who lose hair in the centre lose much more than a few strands of keratin. They lose their place in the world of possibilities and excitement. They lose their right to delusions. Even a fat, black man with a face like a ball of dough kneaded by a disgusted house-wife will look at a woman and sometimes fantasize that she noticed him, gave him that fleeting look, that had he not been so shy he could have won her over. A balding man has no right to such illusions. The hair lying in bunches in his wash basin when he combs it in the morning speaks to him much louder than does his potato-nose in the mirror. He sees all those individual, prone strands, and feels the same desolation that a WWII general might have felt at the sight of so many fine youth, or parts thereof, lying strewn on the battlefield, hanging from the trench wires, spread out on each other on the muddy-bloody grounds. What cruel loss! Ahhh!, the pain that wrenches the heart! How the sight stings the eyes! Can’t see it and can’t take the eyes off it either! A balding man sees death every day. In small parts, and whole in each part.

Couldnt you Think of Something Better?

The most common strategy resorted to by such balding men is also the worst possible. They grow the hair on the fringes of that barren patch to ridiculous lengths. It is almost as if they are afraid to cut it. That fear is understandable, yet irrational. They grow those long beauties and then pull them over carefully to cover the empty patch. It only makes it worse. It not only fails to hide your loss from the world, it exposes your shame too. It tells the world that you are ashamed of what is happening to you. It breeds guilt. It is like saying to yourself “I know I am balding, and damn it, I feel so bad because of that. It’s all my fault. Now no one will love me, and everyone will make fun of me. And they are right to do so, because I am balding. I am ugly because I am balding”. They don’t even stop to think for a moment as to why balding should make them not beautiful.

Ahhhh! The Big Question on the Big B..

Actually, come to think of it, what is beauty?

How do you know what is beautiful and what is not? Why is white skin beautiful and black not? Why is black hair considered beautiful and white is not? In fact, even that is not correct. Black hair is considered beautiful only in certain parts and among certain people of the world. There are places and people who find white hair or yellow hair or blonde hair or copper-coloured hair more beautiful. That is why all those hair color products. Even white skin is not considered the most ideal. Else there wouldn’t be the sight of delicious women trying to catch that tan on sun-kissed beaches, and our campus comps would never have been graced with interesting wallpapers. A slender figured woman might take the heart of Gujju bhai, but an African hunk would ditch her any day for a wide-hipped full house. How do we know what is beautiful?? Why is a big eye more beautiful than a small, slanted one? Why are brown/blue/green eyes more bewitching than simple, plain black ones? Beauty, it would seem, is as subjective as food.

The problem, accompanying thought, expands.

No, Dear Holmes, It's Subjective, not Obvious..

Even values are subjective.

What is right and what is wrong is not the same across the world.
A teacher can be killed, “in righteous public indignation”, if she names a teddy something in a country, whilst in another bar dancers wear star-spangled, blue-striped bikinis – perhaps in a tribute to the intensely patriotic men manfully swinging beer jugs.

So, food is subjective.
Beauty is subjective.
Values are subjective.
Religion, we all know, is subjective.

Back to the Big B Question.

Yet, that doesn’t answer our initial question.
How do you know what is beautiful?
There is one simple answer to that (Of course, there are more complex and logical ones too, but I leave them to 204 to provide those. Btw, 204 is the anonymous, enigmatic, mysterious, sole commenter on my blogs).

You believe something is beautiful if a lot of people tell you it is.


If you are fed a lot of stories in which men die for women who have 6 fingers and are cross-eyed, you will find that beautiful. In fact, and I am not fibbing here, the Mayans used to tie a small plank to their foreheads so that it became slanted like a bird’s. For the same reason they used to hang little pieces of thread between their eyes, so that looking at them they would gradually get cross-eyed which was again considered a beautiful “bird-feature”. Just like, say, a “lion’s mane of hair” (remember the Jap prez who was always described as the prez with the flamboyant mane??).

The idea of Beauty, like that of imperialism, is a poet’s to define and glorify.


Instead of being labeled brutally as ujada chaman center-baldness could be made into an ideal of beauty, if only there was a poet to take up cudgels for fallen bushels.
Beauty not just lies in the eye of the beholder, it is born there.
Like some one very famously said, (though not famously enough for me to remember his name) – I don’t love you because you are beautiful, you are beautiful because I love you.

Gay men are standing up for their rights and all, then why aren’t bald men?

I very strongly believe that women should find bald/balding men very attractive – more so because I am also “headed” the same way – if only they look at them in the right way.

Hawa chali, aur baal ude, to unhone gungunaaya, "Chand fir niklaaa..."

If eyes could be “deep blue pools in which my soul drowns”, and lips could be “rose petals rubbing sensuously against each other” then a bald head too could be something very beautiful if described in the right way.
Just think of that shiny pate, hidden behind those carefully combed strands of black hair……and you could be thinking of…….

A lovely plain fringed by swaying poplars,

Or as premchand said so sweetly,

Baadalon me chhupa chand

Or

Ghoonghat ke peeche lajaati nayi bahu

Or

The gently rippling, shimmering, wet reflection of the moon in the dark waters of a princess’ private pond

Or

It could remind you of shining, glittering silverware in a split open, half-buried treasure chest in black earth

Or

Van me ek chandramani jiske chaaron aur ek makdi ka jaal buna hua hai..

Or

A pearl sleeping in black velvet.

In fact, baldness, along with paunch-ness, is considered a sign of arrived or approaching prosperity in many parts of the world (probably those parts where men go balder faster – definitely not those parts where head bangers come from).

So next time a pretty young thing giggles at your empty patch (which incidentally is shining like a big silver coin) you tell her sweetly

ये गंजापन नहीं है पगली, ये तो आते ऐश्वर्य के देवी के निर्मल पद-चिह्न हैं;
ये तो लक्ष्मी की लैंडिंग के लिए बना helipad हैं

And meanwhile, the struggle continues to prove that
Bald is Beautiful
(only in men)