This morning I visited our local barber Kannan after a long time. Since Covid I have gotten used to infrequent haircuts. The strategy is to cut it real short because this has two fold benefits. The first is obvious – you save money as your next visit is pushed further away. The second is that you save time and this is most important. You don’t have to give any directions to Kannan about ‘short at the back, medium on the side, long at the front etc’ and then pray that he has listened to all of it. You just point at the electric machine and provide a visual instruction with your thumb and forefinger. The excellent machine does the job in a matter of seconds.
My wife thinks I look like a ‘chimpoo’ after a haircut (whatever that means). I suspect that is a reference to the chimpanzee because a chimpanzee looks stupid and passive and has ears disproportionately larger than necessary. She couldn’t be more wrong in her comparison because chimpanzees are smart and aggressive, though it’s a pity about the ears. In any case, I think she needs to get her eyes checked.
Unfortunately Kannan refuses to pass on the benefit of the substantial savings in time and effort and still charges Rs 150 for the haircut. It does not even feel like a haircut but a lawn mower job on the head. Very agricultural and not sophisticated at all. However my real disappointment is that Kannan has progressed to civilized magazines and no longer offers shady stuff like ‘Ghantaram Comics’ and ‘Khooni Hasina’ for people waiting their turn. He is serving us copies of Filmfare, Frontline, Fortune and Forbes that he purchased from the kabaadi who purchased it from us six months back. A hair cutting saloon is supposed to keep magazines that we can’t subscribe at home. It is an unwritten code that cannot be broken.
When I questioned Kannan about why he is straying from the true path, his responses were surprisingly insightful. As per Kannan, the quality of these shady magazines has really gone down because the excellent people who used to produce them have moved on to TV studios and streaming platforms. In order to keep up with the change, he started streaming the content on his 12 inch TV. This turned out to be a bonanza because customers were now requesting additional services like head massage, eyebrow setting and relationship advice in order to spend more time at his saloon.
However his success was short lived. Wives got suspicious when their husbands were returning later than usual from their saloon visits. They teamed up with the golden haired owner of the unisex saloon in the mall who does haircut for a whopping Rs 600 and was jealous of Kannan’s overnight success. Together they dispatched Inspector Macho Murugan to raid Kannan’s saloon and his 12 inch TV was seized. Poor Kannan was let off with a warning and on the condition that he would play only religious channels on his 12 inch TV. Now wives are complaining that their husbands are returning from the saloon in a ‘sanyaasi’ like condition and want to go on ‘vanvaas’ for 14 years.
The actions of the golden haired unisex saloon owner have made him extremely popular with the womenfolk who now throng his saloon, which is now unisex only in name as all the men have moved their business to Kannan after the treacherous, below the belt act. One beneficiary of this entire saga has been Superpower Swamy, whose channel also gets streamed on Kannan’s 12 inch TV. I suspect that Swamy and Kannan are in cahoots. How is it possible that every time a customer is getting done with his haircut, Swamy’s face appears on the TV and tells them to buy a head massage or some dubious hair loss ointment from Kannan? Surely Swamy has his CCTV cameras inside Kannan’s saloon. Maybe I need to ask Snoopy Susie to investigate this.