As some men know, a consequence of losing hair is gaining face. They might be among the 500 men who have formed a new fellowship called the All-Kerala Bald-Headed People’s Association. According to a news report, the idea of the club came from a film actor, who soon quit and remains anonymous. He was probably unwilling to be exposed as a bald man, which disqualifies him in any case because the objective of the association is to somehow “flaunt” baldness and end its shame.
The spirit of the club is admirable to all self-assured bald and balding men, but its language is suspiciously influenced by the organized lament industry. A foreboding of the club’s future uselessness is in one of its slogans: “Bald is beautiful”. As it is, most alliterations are daft, but calling bald “beautiful” is far worse than daft—an admission of defeat. When you plan a rebellion against the order of things, you should not profess to be a part of the order. That’s surrender, not uprising. What the oppressor controls should not be dear to the rebel. So, what the baldies should be telling the world is: “Beauty is not all there is to life.” Instead, the association is framing the world of bald men like how the left frames the world in general—as a place teeming with villains and their victims who need the comfort of nonsensical compliments.
The fact is that if tomorrow there is a real solution to baldness that is not very expensive and has no side-effects, all bald men will “cure” themselves. Handsome bald men will become handsome men with hair; and unattractive bald men will become unattractive men with hair. All bald-men’s clubs in the world will cease to exist. As baldness concerns men, mostly, the condition is not so sacred yet, unlike other forms of victimhood. Therefore, we can still state truths about it plainly, and we can see the idiocy of empathetic slogans like “bald is beautiful”.
The fellowship of bald men has more meaning than the farcical bonds many communities share. Bald men are a creation of a small set of mysterious genes, whose purpose is not known. Natural selection would have abolished baldness and denied millions of bald men the lottery of life if only, during our primitive ages, baldness had occurred in early adolescence rather than later. Bald men are the proof that not every mutation needs to have a reason that should favour man. Things happen for no reason. Evolution is not progress; evolution is merely change. That is the meaning of bald men.
Seen this way, a bald man has more intelligent reasons to cheer the success of other bald men than Indians have in celebrating the success of remote foreigners of “Indian origin”. A few days ago, when Abhijit Banerjee won the economics Nobel Prize, the pride of the alumni of Jawaharlal Nehru University for the triumph of one of its own, and of the citizens of Kolkata for the man who once lived there, and of many Bengalis across the world, reminded me of a poem by G.K. Chesterton in which a donkey that is carrying Jesus Christ thinks huge crowds have come to worship it. Bald men of the world have a greater claim to be a single clan thanmany Indian groups.
Larry David, bald man and the co-creator of Seinfeld, captured the fellowship of baldness very often in his other show, the exquisite Curb Your Enthusiasm. Once, after a girl abuses him as a “bald a**hole”, he tells police officers, “That’s a hate crime. We consider ourselves to be a group.” When the officer tells him, “I’m bald and I’m not offended,” David says: “With all due respect, officer Berg, you are not bald. You’ve chosen to shave your hair and that’s a look you’re cultivating in order to look fashionable, but we don’t really consider you part of the bald community...”
People often misunderstand humour as caricature. It is, at times, but often the evidence that a hypothesis is true is in a measure of how funny the hypothesis is.
The very features that make David argue, somewhat convincingly, lends baldness a degree of seriousness. Millions of bald men do go through their lives looking like the “before” picture in hair-transplant ads, which show a dejected bald man transforming into a happy man with a mop of hair. Many bald men who are unattractive or innately unsure of themselves blame their baldness just like the depressed mistake heads of state as the cause of their melancholy.
In Gabriel García Márquez’s Love In The Time Of Cholera, a balding man searches for a cure for years: “He memorized the agricultural information in the Bristol Almanac because he had heard that there was a direct relationship between the growth of hair and the harvesting cycles. He left the totally bald barber he had used all his life for a foreign newcomer who cut hair only when the moon was in the first quarter.”
In spirit, this is not very different from the quest of modern bald men. To liberate such men, Kerala’s “bald-headed people’s association” plans to groan about self-respect and make bald men run marathons. Instead, they should consider taking an element from capitalistic self-interest and joyous decadence. They should create a club that uses baldness only as a norm for entry; nothing else about the fellowship should be about the condition. They should become a network of influential bald men who put together extraordinary and entertaining events; they should get special deals on every material service for the bald.
To make people happy, there needs to be no lament.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, and a novelist, most recently of ‘Miss Laila, Armed And Dangerous’.
