I’ll call it the Straightened Hair Theory

I have what you will call unruly hair; I’ll skip the part that tells you in detail about what I mean when I say unruly. Let’s just say, I have bad hair day, 6 days a week.
Okay, so last week I had this little party to go to, for which I neither had the right dress nor the attitude, so I decided to at least have the right hair. I went to the nearest saloon. 35 minutes of hot ironing and loads of Chinese chatter later, I emerged with poker straight hair, hair that shines, hair that you’d love to touch, hair that sways when you say a Yes or a No. Yeah with that hair I went to the party where my reply to every compliment was,”thanks but only till the next wash.” And then as I headed home it struck me maybe, just maybe I should get my hair permanently straightened.

The next morning, I woke up with hair that needed no brushing and a strong resolve to get a permanent fix. Yeah I had found my salvation. My world was about to change.

So I went about my day, writing and checking copy. Then sometime little after noon, out of nowhere, for reasons far too dull to go into, I started hating my hair. The straightness, the silkiness, the shine, I hated everything. It all of a sudden felt limp, scanty and phony. I wanted to get home, wash my hair and greet the unruliness back.

Just so you know, this post is not part of Dove’s real celebrities campaign, or some you are beautiful the way you are initiative. This hair episode is here because it had a little lesson for me. A life lesson if I may call it so. So, here goes – there could be many things that you would want to change in your life, important and trivial. And quite often the change that we had sought and worked so hard for turns out to be a huge downer. Unfortunately unlike straightened hair, which wears off in 6-8 months, this alteration could be a little more damaging. Well, so what’s the deal you ask, would one never do new things, would one never try to change? Of course one would. And this is where my Straightened Hair Theory comes to play. What this theory tells you to do is sample the change. Before you go for a complete overhaul. Say for instance, if you want to switch cities. Instead of going all lock, stock and barrel, take off and be in that city for a fortnight. Stay away from all touristy things, do the regular stuff. Ideally take a cab to and fro to your possible place of work, once daily for 5 days. Preferably during the peak hours. And on your way back try doing the groceries too. And while you are at it, collect the laundry from the presswala across the street. By the end of your trial stay, does the city still hold its charm?

And, this, ladies and gentlemen, is my STRAIGHTENED HAIR THEORY.

Why telling someone he is normal, is possibly the worst thing you could do.

The smarts, they say always have that streak of madness in them. Being in Advertising and being a writer, one could almost fail as a writer if one isn’t a little crazy. And I do grudgingly accept that the best writers I have met were all a tad eccentric.
Someone very dear to me, who is also quite a gym fanatic thinks normal people can never be regular at the gym. “They aren’t insecure, they don’t have a reason to slog it out in the gym, why would they“, he says.

All my life I have been told I was normal. And all my life I was happy with it. Because I always associated normal with sanity, zero fuss, ease and simplicity. Which were all nice things, I assumed.

Now when someone calls me normal, I ask if I am normal to the point of being boring, ambitionless, uncreative and stupid. Answers often vary.

While that’s not being fair on the normal tribe, but there’s indeed a point here. Normal means you aren’t weird. Normal means you are kind of okay with yourself. And there lies the problem. When you aren’t troubled, you are happy and when you are happy, you wouldn’t want to change anything, and when you don’t want to change a thing, you would most certainly not work like a maniac. And when you don’t work that way, you would stay where you are, and not do anything great with your life. And which makes normal a not very pleasant thing.

So to sum it up, calling someone normal means he/she is not good at his/her desk job, is not capable of doing any better, is boring and is not in shape.

Weird is what I aspire to be.