‘Mooch’ ado!

Dear Diary Didi,

It’s not fair! The male gender always gets the best end of every deal. They even get to keep the Abhinandan mooch! His gunslinger moustache is the fashion trend of the year and women simply can’t have one unless they paint one on or something.

BTW, who decreed that women should have plucked and shaped eyebrows and a mooch-less upper lip? Why must women subject their faces to the absolute slaughter of excavating the roots of miniscule hair from it? Not to mention the trauma caused by tweezing/ threading gone wrong. If the beautician threads too much hair from the brow, you end up with a look of permanent surprise on your face. If, on the contrary, you let them grow, you’d be haunted by the fear of looking like Albert Einstein. In addition, the pokey bristle on your brows/ upper lip could cause even the most amorous suitor to hold back.

You relinquish all control to the beautician who wields the thread. She’s got you sitting with your neck stretched back, face up. Then, she leans over you, thread held between her teeth, ready to extract. You shut your eyes and hope like hell that she doesn’t have bad breath or leave deposits of saliva on the thread that extends from her mouth to your eyebrow/ upper lip. Once she has you in the helpless position, she mentions that you’ll need to stretch the skin between your eyelid and forehead while she works, and that the more tightly you stretch the skin, the less the threading will hurt. So, there you are stretching your own skin in opposite directions while you willingly allow (and thereafter pay) for the onslaught by a tormenting thread.

The threading of the mooch is much worse! You are expected to have a stiff upper lip to enable the removal of the offending bristly hair. You shove your tongue into the inside of your lip as firmly as you can. A look at yourself in the mirror at that moment will remind you of the species you descended from! You want to let out a scream of pain, but stoically ‘hold your tongue’ for fear of getting a ‘thread cut’ on your lip. Finally, a stinging astringent on the affected skin to complete the torture.

Moustaches are traditionally associated with bravery and masculinity in India, but they should give women awards for bravery in the face of pain. In Punjab, they believe: “Moochh nahi, kuchh nahi”. And the Provincial Armed Constabulary in Uttar Pradesh is rewarded for robust moustaches with Rs 250. Batao!

I tell you, keeping a moustache is the easiest thing. All you need to do is to let your hair do what it does best — grow. Men may think it a symbol of machismo, but I’d like to see how stoic even the most dangerous bandit, Veerappan, would have been under the thread.

Seems like women have their own brand of machismo, even though it’s called masochism. 

Anyhow, let men have their gunslinger mooch. We women prefer a gunslinger cocktail any day.

Cheers and Abhinandan to that!