Snap! Cuttt! I could hear the sound of my hair breaking as I ran my fingers through them. I reacted like I heard a death knell of a loved one. My eyes looked incriminatingly at my fingers as if saying that God won’t forgive them.
Never in my life had I so much as quivered my lips or eyelashes while combing my hair. About a few months ago, my friends reported my hair loss to me. I tried to ignore the reports. My explanations, more of retaliations saying that I had two whirls (spots on the scalp where hair doesn’t grow) because of which I look like I’m losing hair, were in vain. They claimed to have a knack of recognizing a hair loss. With every report, I wanted to prove the reporters to be charlatans.
With passing time and more reports, I grew wiser. It was like a bat realizing, after repeatedly being told that the world was indeed upright, that it was because it was hanging upside down that world appeared upside down; not otherwise as the bat may have thought. Thereafter, I started fishing for excuses. “I wear helmet!” would be an excuse. “I don’t get enough sleep,” was another.
No man capable of recognizing the truth can remain happy giving excuses for something, when he himself knows that excuses can’t change the truth. I started caring for my hair. As a part of such measures, I’d never touch my hair, eat more fruits and sleep more. Yet there was, somewhere deep inside, fear and panic. Family portraits showing my grandfather would only aggravate my fear. That hair loss is in my family made mine look agonizingly inevitable.
In one of my introspective moods, I recollected that regular stress leads to hair loss. Standing in front of the mirror one day I was asking myself, with a peeved and indignant look, what my worries were. As if there was a wise man whose sagacity made him wait in anticipation for that very moment and question, an answer came out. “Maybe your very worry about losing hair is it.” My initial reaction to push aside that thought gave way to more serious deliberation.
Like every paradox, the inner voice seemed to make sense. For a man who cherishes eight-hour sleep and leads a not unhealthy life, it is hard to pick out issues adversely affecting the hair (health). Could bothering excessively about hair fall itself cause hair fall?
“To have dense and long hair, it must be maintained well. To maintain it, it must be kept short,” my father said whenever he saw me trying to grow hair. What an irony? Imagine keeping your hair short all the time to keep it healthy. When is the time to grow it long then? Particularly, when you consider the point that you want to grow hair and make your head look fertile, the above idea seems absurd. How can you suggest a man to shave his head as a way of growing hair?
Life is a co-existence of paradoxes and ironies.
I realized another irony from Ogden Nash’s poem “This is going to hurt just a little bit“. We spend a lot on regular health care, so that we need not go to a hospital or clinic. And what do we do for that? We go to a doctor! What an irony? All the same avoiding the whole regular check-up idea doesn’t help. In the latter case, we’d find out in a painful way that “Penny wise, Pound foolish.” [That may trigger another train of thought, "What must happen, happens", but I'm holding my mind from doing so.]
My mom may look like a simpleton, but some of life’s problem’s solutions coming from her can mortify great thinkers. On rare occasions when I was studying hard or playing and relaxing or working at something so much, that I didn’t go to eat on time, I was rebuked by her. In a more patient tone after an exasperated one, she would say rhetorically, “What do we all work hard for – that we may earn enough to eat. The other comforts or necessities become secondary. Henceforth, you must never ill- treat food. Life becomes meaningless if your stomach, and thus your body, and thus your mind are not happy.”
“How true!” I realized. A person may eat less; another may eat more. However, the underlying truth is that both categories must be satisfied. Why are there so many dishes and cuisines if all the essentials could be taken in by swallowing certain pills? (Again, there is a certain natural design and a natural way of doing things. Train of thought! back to this topic oh Mind of mine!) The way a man lives is the way his taste buds are treated. The different tastes caress and tingle the tongue, inspire, excite and generally make one look forward to the future. Why else would so many activities take place over a lunch or a dinner? You invite people to your house for dinner. And man is not alone in this regard. Other animals too have tastes. Have you ever tried forcing a dog or a cow into eating something it doesn’t like? I have, and I tell you, it is impossible. Other animals too socialize over food. The whole concept of beautiful and complex looking honeycombs revolves around honeybee food.
There comes into starved men (quantity or quality), a listlessness and lack of ambition and desire to live. With the stomach growling for attention, no other issue can compete with it. Yet, there are times in life when we feel the need to deviate from the natural. Consider the situation where you are to meet someone after lunch. The success of the post lunch session will manifest in the form of a richer you. Despite the need to be there on time, you delay your meeting because you want to take care of your stomach. The result could be that that would be your last meal in that expensive place.
Another related irony that comes to mind is the one which involves two men- Lazy, Industrious. Industrious sees Lazy lazing around while he was toiling hard in his farm. Industrious, in a reproachful way, asks, “Why are you not working? Why are you lazing around? Do some work.” Lazy pretending to be inquisitive, says,”What should I work for?” “So that you may earn!”, says Industrious. “And precisely what may I do with my earnings,” says Lazy, now seeming to get into the groove. “You may buy things and comforts and luxuries”, says Industrious, proud to have a patient yet willing student. “What do I do with comforts and luxuries?” asks Lazy, innocently. “Duh! Comforts are to make life nice and easy! So that you can relax!” Industrious says, now getting irritated. Lazy says, “What do you think I am doing now, then?” The issue is not a simple one as either men view it. There are ramifications for anything in life. The idea was more than anything, to show how ironical life is (or seems).
After learning from my grandfather (a vet) how they prepare vaccinations, I got very philosophical. (It doesn’t take me much to get into that.) To prepare a vaccination against a disease, the agents causing it are injected into a healthy body. The body would then try to fight by producing antibodies. The body may die. The serum (Some antibodies thus produced) is then injected into another body. This process goes till one such body survives. That is how they know the concentration of the disease causing agents to be injected so as to make the body immune. (Isn’t it ironical again?) Also in viewing many educative programs on TV I learnt that when a body recovers from sickness, it is stronger and more immune to that sickness than before. That means, to be healthy and strong, we must fall ick. The more often, the better it is for us. Yet, falling sick is a weakness and not strength.Â
As a kid, my challenge to the proverb “Slow and steady wins the race,” was “Fast and steady wins the race too, and faster!” Experience and wisdom taught me that being fast (relative and depends on the person) and being steady at the same time is not possible. You may run faster and complete the race faster, but so long as you are doing so, there is a greater danger of falling and losing the race than if you were to run slower. Here again I feel indignant. Why should it be this way? Why can’t I win with my principle? With experience (again) I realized that perhaps that is the way our Creator designed his project. The design keeps the whole system stable. If not for the design, we’d have nothing special in life; just bland miracles. The balance brings into the world, our contribution to life, individuality. It brings in uncertainty. If everything were known, we’d have had no idea why we were living; no interest in living.
To end this train of thought that I penned I leave us all with another irony to muse about. If we were to (at least ideally) not make mistakes at all and experience is what we must gain in life (about the ‘correct’ way), how can we do so without making a mistake in the first place?
[tags]Irony,Paradox, Ogden Nash,Hair loss[/tags]
