The all-knowing Barber!

“Hello!”

“Hello; it has been a long time since you last came. Where have you been?”

“It has been only a month!”

“For a haircut, a month is too long.” 

Another visit to your barber’s; It is going to be an interesting forty-five minutes or so with your barber. You are about to be fed some breaking news.  At the barber’s all news is BREAKING! 

“They are going to demolish our village.” 

“You don’t mean it!”

“Yes, they will demolish it within a month.”

Where did he get the news? Who cares! Can the barber kindly reveal his sources? No way! He wouldn’t reveal his source kindly or otherwise. In fact, the last thing any veteran customer of the barber shops wants to ask a barber is where he got the news. I mean the guy is doing service to your otherwise very ordinary looks and offending him wouldn’t be anything less than a cardinal sin. You go in like a Rip Van Winkle badly in need of a haircut and you come out like someone badly in need of some, what else, hair! In the process, your current affairs knowledge goes a few notches up. 

The last time a close friend of mine was at his barber’s a few weeks back he got some breaking news.

“The Third World War would start in a couple of weeks,” he tells me. 

“And, where did you hear that from?”

“My barber told me.” 

His barber didn’t pull the whole thing out of the thin air. He had some doomsday predictions to support his claim. Everything, so he said, would be wiped out within minutes. The dinosaurs must be rolling over in their graves with laughter! At least theirs wasn’t over within minutes! 

One thing I like about barbers telling stories is the confidence they radiate. If they say the Third World War would start then that’s it! 

Look, personally, I prefer the matter-of-fact revelations of barbers than the so-called analysis of half-baked politicians whose sugar-coated ramblings would give you the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s or something equally scary. I prefer the innocence of the barbers than the snobbery of those learned fellows who think only they hold the magic wand to everything. 

Of course, if everything our barbers tell us was to see the light of day, nothing short of a Moses who’d take us across the troubled waters would ensure our survival as the descendants of the Adam fellow. 

Your Internet is down! Don’t worry. Go to the barber, even if there isn’t a single strand of hair left on your head. He’ll tell you what is happening in Afghanistan if that means anything to you. He’d tell you what they are talking about in the corridors of power.

Barbers usually don’t try to convince you. They don’t say “You are with me or you are with them. No middle ground!” They don’t say, “Play second fiddle to my music or else you wouldn’t know what hit you.” You are told a story and that’s all. The revised version is for the next customer. 

In a way, barbers are in the thick of things. I mean every guy who drops in has something to say, be it about political fallouts or marital intrigues. Talk of multiple sources, if only the barbers acknowledge it in so many words. 

“Did you hear?

“Did I hear what?” 

“So and so has been arrested;” 

“Sorry, I thought I saw him the other day.”

“I told you he is arrested!”

That’s it. The barber tells you the son-of-a-gun was arrested and who do you think you are to dispute his story!

I prefer the barber. He tells you this country is to demolish that country and that is it. No conspiracy theories; no “They are fooling us” sort of conspiracy theories. The news is final. 

“Don’t you know that girl?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What! Don’t tell me you’ve been sleeping like the Rip Van Winkle fellow!”

“Who’s she, the niece of the Queen of Sheba?”

“She acts in films and TV serials.”

“So what! SO WHAT!”

The barber would tell you more down-to-earth things. “That lady is flirting with the owner of so and so factory.” He doesn’t even want to know whether you knew her or not. That’s not the point.  

One thing you don’t hear barbers complaining about is that they are charging too low a price. They don’t say, “It’s easier to cut razor wire than some people’s hair. And they pay only thirty birr!” (Yes, there were times one got decent haircut for thirty birr!)

A few months back, someone was telling me about a 300-birr haircut. I don’t know how life is at such a place, and my exploratory genes aren’t going to kick-start anytime soon. “You should try it one of these days, just for fun!” Just for the fun! If I bleed three-hundred birr for a haircut fun is the last thing that would come to my mind. I am from Mars, they are from God knows where. End of story! 

These days most of us are losing confidence in people we once thought hold their heads a few inches higher than us commoners. You expect wisdom and what do you get? Boredom! Sheer boredom. 

“What do you think about this North Korea thing?”

“What North Korea thing?”

“You know their leader is threatening to launch nukes against hat he says are his enemies.”

“Don’t believe what you hear. The West is trying to smear his name. I think the Americans are behind the whole thing.”

“But he is threatening to nuke American cities!”

“I told you this is conspiracy. I think the Americans are telling him to say so.”

So, who fills the void, you might ask. I’ll tell you who fills the void. The barber! The good old barber fills the void. 

Three cheers for the all-knowing barber!

(A slightly edited version of an article written a few years back.)