Haircuts

A month or so ago, I had my worst haircut in a decade or so. Supercuts was the culprit. Ever since I have moved to the US, I have always gone to these generic chain-type haircut places to get my hair cut. Mostly Supercuts since they seem to be everywhere. Every time I come back home from Supercuts with a sheepish grin on my face, my wife just shakes her head in disbelief that I keep going there again and again inspite of all the disasters they have wrought upon my hair in the last several years. Her theory is that people who come fresh out of hair-cutting school (or whatever they call it) go to work at places like Supercuts to gain experience. My counter-argument to this theory is that if people like me don't go to Supercuts, the people working there will never get enough practice to improve at their jobs and will never get out of there to work at a better place. My sacrifices and the sacrifices of people like me go a long way to ensure good haircuts for the rest of the population.

I must say though that one thing that I fail to understand is how the same instructions can be subject to different interpretations at different locations of the same chain and even different barbers at the same location. 'Number 3 on the sides and Number 4 on the top' is as easy as instructions go. 50% of the time I have walked out of the salon with my dignity intact but the rest of the time, the results have been catastrophic. But thankfully my hair, resilient that it is, grows out in a few days and masks the injustice borne upon it by the butchers masquerading as hair-stylists. This is also one of the reasons why I keep going to Supercuts, because no matter how bad the hair-cut, the results are only temporary. But paying $14 plus a $3 tip for a bad haircut somehow seems wrong on many fronts. It especially becomes a moral issue when you have paid that much for the worst haircut of your life in the past decade. No matter what anyone says, it is the principle of the matter and the bad haircut is just a secondary issue. Why would you want to pay someone a lot of money for doing a bad job ?

This mood of defiance led me to defect from Supercuts to a small independent hair salon which boasted a $8 haircut in bold green letters outside its window. I figured that even if they messed up my hair, I would only be paying almost half the money which I usually pay for the same service. My gamble paid off. The $8 haircut (plus $3 tip) was one of the best haircuts I have had in the US in a long time.

But don't always believe everything you hear when someone is singing praises about a hair salon. In fact don't believe everything you see either. I recall a particularly unpleasant experience in Bombay at a barber shop. My friend MP and I went to a barber's shop at the same time and he had a haircut before me and he also got a head massage. Over a period of time, I have seen a lot of people getting head massages and they looked liked they enjoyed it. But I had never tried it because the 'massage' techniques that the barbers followed did not look so pleasant. One of the moves involved squeezing your head with their palms as if it was a giant lemon. They also had this move of cupping their palms and hitting the back of your head lightly so that it made a clapping sound. This was standard procedure across barber shops in India. Some of them even used fists and lightly drummed your head. Our barber had done all three moves and more on MP and MP actually looked refreshed. So when it was my turn, I asked for a head massage as well. After all I had to know what I was missing. But the next 5 minutes or so can be termed as the only time in my life when I have paid somebody to hit me. I remember gripping the arms of the chair under the cloak so tight because I was afraid I would lose my self-control and attack the barber for the physical abuse he was subjecting my head to. And the irony or comedy, however you look at it, was that I was paying him for it. Never again have I had a head massage. I have been scarred for life because even when the Supercuts people offer something as harmless as a shampoo, I refuse. No thank you, I just want a simple haircut, nothing more.

Every month or so, I face the dilemma of choosing which barber shop to go to, although 90% of the time, it does not seem to matter because the results are not what I expect. But I must count my blessings; at least I have still retained a full head of hair which causes this pesky dilemma. As I grow older, I do hope I will still have the option of discovering the worst barber shops of the world.