An evening outside a beauty parlour

Every once in a while, life throws some interesting experiences at you. These experiences can be so impactful that they end up making you wiser, cautious and more knowledgeable than you were before. Lately I have been going through several such experiences, but I would like to specifically talk about one such experience that happened last weekend. It is interesting for two reasons 1) It involves an instance of the fairer sex  (I can hear the guys saying "ALRIGHT!!!" ) 2) It also has to do with a beauty parlour (REEEEAAALLLLYYY?? yeah really, you think it's fun ?).

Many of you might be wondering as to what I was doing at a beauty parlour. Trust me, at the end of the whole experience, I ended up asking myself the same question - "What was I doing at a beauty parlour of all places and that too on a weekend ?"  sigh..strange are the ways of life. Here's the story for you - A cousin of mine, who lives in Cochin, was visiting Bangalore to meet her folks. She had a marriage to attend at her hubby's place in Dharwad and she thought it might be a good idea to spend a week in Bangalore before proceeding to Dharwad. She called me up last weekend to check if she could hang out at my place and if I could drive her around to a couple of places in the city to help her do justice to her shopping list. Somewhere during that call, when I wasn't paying attention, she quickly mentioned to me that I had to also take her to a beautician so that she could get her eyebrows done. Honestly, until that point, I had absolutely no clue about this "getting eyebrows done" business. After thinking about it for a couple of seconds, I guessed that it had something to do with women trimming their eyebrows so that they could look good (and see well perhaps ;) ) and all that jazz. Given the fact that we i.e men, need just about 10 minutes to get our hair cut and that an eyebrow has substantially lot less hair compared to a guy's head, I concluded that eyebrows can be "done" in about 3 minutes flat. A bit of googling after the call suggested that anybody could "do" eyebrows and I wondered why my cousin had to consult a beautician for it. But then, since I was going to be doing more horrendous things like driving around Bangalore, carrying shopping bags for her,  and explaining to her as to why a white salwar with blue whatever looks a lot better than a blue salwar with white whatever, I thought killing 20 minutes for an eyebrow-cut wasn't going to hurt much. Alas, I was so wrong !!

Firstly I realised that there's a strange connection between a woman and her beauty parlour. You can't convince her to visit some parlour. It has to be one where she's been going ever since she had eyebrows worth "getting done". Women and beauty parlours seem to connect intensely at very deeper levels. It is almost as if every girl gets randomly assigned to a parlour as soon as she is born. By the way, this pseudo-random assignment algorithm never picks the nearest parlour. So she wouldn't care if there's a parlour right beside her house. She has to visit the one that is 10 kms away. No matter how much you try convincing her, she won't budge and you finally have no other option but to yield. Apparently, the woman-parlour force is too strong for a man to conquer. He may instead drive through bizarre traffic, swear at autorickshaw drivers, park his car some ten stories above the ground and surrender to the might of the force. And while all this is happening, the lady keeps examining her eyebrows oblivious to the fact that the guy beside her is actually pulling his hair out !! You know, wherever I have lived so far, I have always chosen a barber who charges the least and whose shop is the closest to my place. After all, time is money , money is precious, but unfortunately a hair-cut isn't  all that precious. All I care is that I shouldn't be spending more than 2 seconds combing my hair every morning. Somehow, this logic doesn't seem to work with women and especially my cousin. Learning 1: When it comes to logic, eyebrows and women, logic must fail.

I obviously didn't enter the parlour and so I told her to give me a buzz when she's done. After all, it shouldn't take her anything more than 3 minutes. Add some "waiting time" and the whole exercise should get over in about 20 minutes. Right ? Wrong ! I could sense the devilish woman-parlour force giving me a wicked grin. Ignoring the hints that were coming my way, courtesy the forces of nature, I decided to step into a bookshop situated close by. I sat there reading a comic, responding to messages from my friends every now and then. After about 20 minutes of valuable reading,  I decided to call up my cousin to check if she was done. Well, to her misfortune and to my agony, she told me that she was still waiting for her turn and there were 10 girls ahead of her !! The wicked grins had just gotten wider. I looked around and spotted a coffee shop this time. I walked in and ordered a huge mug of cold coffee. The shop was also playing the highlights of a recent India-Australia test match and so I sat there wondering if there could be a better setting than this to enjoy one's coffee . As the cricket highlights got over (must have been an hour), I checked on my cousin again and this time she wouldn't answer her phone. I guessed that her turn had come and she was busy "shaping" her eyebrows. A bit more waiting and hopefully she should be done. I decided to take a walk as the evening weather was really good. I stopped by a roadside bookshop that was selling cheap re-prints of books that I wanted to read for quite some time now. Just as I was negotiating a deal where I felt that I had mastered the art of bargaining, my phone rang. After a 2 hour wait where I must have checked my watch a hundred times, it was finally time to pick up the cousin.  Learning 2: There's more to a woman's eyebrow than what meets the man's eye. As I moved to leave the bookshop, I thought I saw a book that read "All the great men who died waiting outside beauty parlours".

When a woman asks you how she looks, especially after a visit to the parlour, make sure you give her the right answer. In most cases, you won't notice any substantial change in her looks. If you tell her that she looks great, you can move on and have that pizza your stomach has been craving for. If you stumble and tell her the truth, she'll walk back into the parlour again !!  Learning 3:  Beauty is subtle. Make sure you learn to notice it. Unfortunately, there's no deterministic way of clearly spotting a post-parlour change. Agree that there has been a change and make your life better.

I wondered what married men go through.

Should I really publish this ? Oh what the hell !