Welcome to the Barbershop

Music is something that is important to many people. The ways in which they pick up their tastes are controlled by a million different things, mostly by their friends or their parents, sometimes through experimentation too. But for me, music has been a discovery in certain other senses. My tastes have been conditioned by what I've heard during my monthly visits to that gardener of the cranium with a lawnmower of vibrating steel: the barber. You must all be tired by now of trying to understand how this even makes sense but I shall attempt to clarify.
My earliest memory involves my grandfather escorting me to the local barbershop in the basement off a busy street in Madras. My initiations to Tamil music began there as I attempted to doze off in the seat just so that I wouldn't have to think about anything while waiting for the trim to get over. This, of course, was the days when I actually had something growing out of my skull, in contrast to my follicular state today. I didn't really know how long I sat there since no child has any sense of time at the at age but I clearly remember coming home humming a tuneless ditty in my head. Today, of course, my Tamil heritage is reiterated every night as my Dad listens to the black and white odes to MGR and his ilk. Telugu music somehow never made its way into my head as my visits to the barber when I lived in Hyderabad were more brief and also owing to the power cuts at the time. But I did get the idea of a barbershop as a place where people met and spoke about all sorts of things while waiting for their turn.
Hindi music was more of a television phenomenon, since no barber of mine ever spoke in Hindi or listened to the radio in his shop. And I'm glad too, looking at the furor a single song can create in the midst of a biased public. No one wants the only man in a shop with two weapons in his hand angry over the depiction of a certain sensibility. More recently, my introduction to Kannada music has set me wondering as to this set of experiences of mine. What makes a person part of a city where they don't belong? Embracing the music of the city does afford them a path to integration but is that enough? It's surprising how deep your questions can become when you have to sit absolutely still in a chair while someone holds a razor against your throat and the back of your neck. But then, most of them disappear as soon as you leave the chair and pay the man responsible for them. It's also fun when they assume you don't know their language because they see you as an outsider. Recently, during one of my visits, the barber struck up a conversation with his assistant mocking my lack of hair at such a young age, among other jokes about me in Kannada, assuming I did not know the language as I had given him my instructions in Tamil. The shock on his face when I handed him his cash and replied to one of his queries in Kannada was compensation enough for the insults.
My choice of barbers is now multiple due to their ability to set up shop anywhere around, though unlike most people, my choice relies solely on my mood to listen to a certain language at that time. Maybe it's time to visit Calcutta and see how 'intellectual' the barbers can be... ;)

Ciao!