The 'Hairy' Story...

 

This is a 'hairy' situation, amidst these pandemic times...

And trust me when I say this - the bristling possibilities of your moustache fills up my thoughts day in and day out. The wispy strands have managed to give me sleepless nights and jittery days!

Wise men - in all probability with flowing healthy well- nourished moustaches - say that the Greek word 'mastax' was purloined by the chivalrous Scots and mutated it to 'mystax', which means mouth or lips. Later in the course of history, the Greeks retrieved their word and rechristened it 'moustakion'. The Italians called it 'mostaccio'. Finally the French gentlemen conquered the prized word and gave the word ' moustache', sometime around the last quarter of the sixteenth century...

I have been trying to understand your recent attachment to those bristles on your upper lip..Maybe you took inspiration from the knights of the Dark Ages who, as they say, used custom-made helmets to keep their flowing moustaches safe. 

I feel a strong kinship with the celebrated novelist Mulk Raj Anand today. I allowed myself to dig the ‘scary and ‘hairy’ dungeon of my rusted memory to reminisce about Anand’s famous short story, A Pair Of Mustachios, and recollected the various categories of the ‘ornament’ which you are obsessed with at the moment. Anand classified moustaches into different categories. The lion moustache is upstanding symbol of that great order of resplendent rajas, maharajas, nawabs and English army generals; the tiger moustache - the uncanny, several-pointed moustache worn by the unbending, unchanging survivals from the ranks of the feudal gentry who have nothing left but pride in their greatness and a few mementoes of past glory; the goat moustache—a rather unsure brand, worn by the newly-rich, the new commercial class and the shopkeeper category who somehow don’t belong. Then there is the Charlie Chaplin moustache worn by the lower middle class, by clerks and professional men, a kind of half-and-half affair, deliberately designed as a ‘compromise between the traditional full moustache and the clean-shaven Curzon cut of the sahibs like them to keep mustachios at all’; the sheep moustache of the coolies and the lower orders the mouse moustache of the peasants, and so on…

While the Indian men seem to have equated the ‘health’ of their moustaches with virility and muscularity fairly early in history, the British picked up the cue later (like you did in your middle-age). British military adventurers started getting orders to grow facial hair to stay fighting fit in cold climates and to command respect from their new subjects in Asian colonies. The modern Indian military is also very conscious of the ‘moustache saga’. The Indian Navy only places grooming restrictions on facial hair, banning neither the beard nor the moustache, and Sikh servicemen have always been exempt from the beard ban. In Indian Air Force, you can retain a beard and moustache if you enter the service wearing these.  Across the border, many Pakistani servicemen are allowed to keep beards, but some have clashed with their superior officers, and even gone to court, over service rules that rigidly control the length and style of these beards. You can see quite magnificent whiskers in certain Army units, like the Madras Regiment and the Rajput Regiment. And when the Indian Air Force's Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman crossed over to Attari in India from Wagah in Pakistan, his gunslinger whiskers charmed the entire nation. His whiskers became more popular than the tales of his stint in Pakistani captivity, and even more famous than his tea-sipping ceremony in enemy land. Many consumer brands piggybacked on Abhinandan’s resplendent moustache. Barber shops bombarded prospective customers with posters of his face. The famous brand  Amul resurrected a four-year-old commercial, encouraging Indians to drink milk and dedicated it “To Abhinandan" - wand capped with a slogan that is also a popular Indian maxim—“mooch nahin to kuch nahin”. The safe return of the moustache, and also the wing commander (yes, in that order), created an unprecedented wave of mass hysteria . While I had not foreseen this sort of obsession with a few hard facial hairs on the tense morning of India- Pakistan’s air battle, over the last few months I have realized how these bristles can make or break destinies...

I have really wondered, and wondered seriously, about one thing – why have you decided to sport a moustache (irrespective of its state of ‘natural growth’) instead of a full-bodied beard?  The answers I dwelled upon were of different genres. Unlike beards, the moustache is rarely a sign of orthodoxy or religious inclination. Maybe you were inspired by the Rajputs, who are synonymous with valor and power; they are historically depicted with moustaches rather than beards. Also, the beard is always serious (remember the bearded Bhishma of Mahabharata with a face-full of white beard?) while the moustache seems youthful and mischievous. Those bygone gentlemen look like they enjoyed their virile innocence, born of a time when beards were beards and men were men, when pathetic bristles did not  make gentlemen sheepish.

For me, facial hair is both funny and strange - it’s a weed that grows across the borderlands of folly and fashion. Maybe it has to do something with the fact that I am a female and can never grow a moustache. A luscious handlebar or an unimpressive patch, any form of moustache  is a great bane for me. Appreciating one is even more taxing. Some intellectuals may imagine that moustaches add gravitas to their already-blooming persona. Sometimes I wonder if a sizeable ration of  moustachioed gentlemen around me wear fake moustaches!!