Meesai Machismo

So such a serious blog name doesn't mean I am usually a serious person. Maybe INFPs are the intense kind generally. But maybe being a joker is a defence strategy I've developed over the years to a fine art ;) This preamble simply to say you're going to get no soul-searching outta me tonight. If any of you are reading, and are committed to handlebar meesais, you should probably not read any further! Coming up: one full-blown rant on unfashionable facial hair types.

I call them meesais and not moustaches because they are prolific in the motherland. And I associate them with the oh-so-Tamil man - and woman, for that matter - and self-satisfied smirks of fatal attraction possibilities! Get this for example:

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=S7C_5NB4bSU&feature=related

Ha! My dad had a pretty big moustache and other people I respect do - and my mum swears that without a moustache every weakness of the mouth shows so that one can only giggle in response to 'hello'. My poor mother. Still I am scarred by encounters with the meesai.

I walked out of school one afternoon, blazing hot 1 pm sun. And I walk circumspectly edged against the wall that lines the long, narrow driveway into the alma mater, knowing every incoming car knows the schoolgirl comes first. I was 11? 12? Anyway, I'm swinging my starched, A-line not-long-enough, not-short-enough skirt, holding my unwieldy lunch basket and shifting 13 kilos from one shoulder to the next (such troopers we were) until I'm nearly certain I don't have any more shoulders. And I'm glad school's done for the day, when who should come along but Biker Dude, in wanna-be black sunglasses and all-black shirt and jeans. He only gets classified dud in retrospect though - so I don't know how coloured my historiography is! At the time, I chose to name it The Curious Incident of the Uncle in the Afternoon. He must have been a little younger than the going rate for uncles generally, with handlebars that vied with his bike's for symmetry and attention. And he tried, from a distance of several yards in a harmless attempt at humour, to block my path. You know it - you go left, they go right, and you do that little dance, so often unintentional. And then he grinned - and oh sorrow, he waggled that meesai at me. I crossed the road. Dance over. No, 'hello, uncle, I'm studying in 3rd standard' opp for you, bud.

Scarred.

Again, switch slides to another after-school journey back home. What do we have here? Policeman combing his badge of honour down either side, twirling it manfully in the face of a police bike's rearview mirror. Guffaws of laughter in the backseat. More tarnishment of the poor meesai.

Not so scarred, but etched for life.

Upward curls on pot-bellied policemen. Tarnishment - check.

Prerequisite for the upswung lungi, symbol of extreme proprietorship, Mallu and Tam landlord images, swaggering but uncreditable machismo. Like, check this out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aCShcWz5XQ&feature=related The moustache is what you get ID-d on. No entry into Kerala's hottest and most exclusive, or TN's for that matter, without.

More tarnishment. From a colonised, conditioned, Peetru. If you don't know what that is, embrace your identity in Madras terms.