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Rohit Sareen, 32, an information technology professional in Mumbai, shaved off his French beard at the beginning of November. It was painful because he had sported the look “for as long as I can remember”. He even annoyed his wife by taking the razor to his luxuriant facial garden. But Sareen wanted to support Movember, a global movement that has set aside the month of November every year for men to grow a moustache, or mo, to draw attention to men’s health issues. Sareen had to rid his face of the French beard because Movember enjoins supporters to begin on a clean slate, so to say, and grow a moustache of one’s liking till the end of the month. A third of the way into November, Sareen today has something that even he is hard put to name, describing it as a cross between a “trucker” and a “handlebar”.
Sareen initially wanted to go in for a “rockstar” version of a handlebar, but chucked the idea since it is a fad among celebrities like Ranveer Singh, Shikhar Dhawan and Ravindra Jadeja. He wanted his lip bush to stand out, so that he could draw the attention of colleagues and relatives and then inform them of Movember and issues like prostate cancer, testicular cancer and male mental health. He decided right, for he has been an object of curiosity among folks in his office and outside.
“Historically, the moustache had been held in some suspicion in North America and the UK, with the exception of Victorian times, as being the sign of a ‘fop, foreigner or fiend’. It became highly sexualised in the 1970s, as many gay men, pornstars and ‘swingers’ wore it,” says A D Peterkin, author of One Thousand Mustaches — A Cultural History of the MO. “In parts of Asia, the moustache is a standard facial hair signifying masculinity and authority. It is not a fad that comes and goes, it is ‘standard issue’,” he adds. In Turkey, men with bushy moustaches are recognised as those holding leftist views, their counterparts on the right identifiable by bristles drooping down to the chin.
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Movember has put respect back in the moustache, giving it the aura of advocacy. Not that the scratchy growth hasn’t fascinated cultures for ever. Leave a youngster with a pen and a picture of a man, and you will invariably find a moustache inked in. To indicate ire against someone, you would be wont to draw a “caterpillar” below the man’s nose in an attempt to equate him with Adolf Hitler, forgetting, of course, that it was again a “caterpillar” that distinguished the comedy of Charlie Chaplin from those of a million wannabes.
The Mo-Bros (supporters of moustaches) aside, however, there is a growing trend for men to take to the razor. Sareen, of course, says, “I think I’ll keep this for a while; my wife loves it too.” But others of his ilk today want a clean-shaven look. In many ways, this identifies them with the modern ways of the West. Peterkin, when told that Indian youth disdain lip hair these days, reasons that it has all to do with changing attitudes. “Facial hair has become a symbol of rebellion in interesting ways,” he says. “In the West, where men were clean-shaven after both the World Wars, beatniks and hippies protested against authority and militarism by becoming hairy. Not surprisingly, in cultures like India where facial hair is the norm and comes with projections of machismo and authority, young men are going to distinguish themselves and break with the past by being clean-shaven.”
A University of New South Wales research says that women actually prefer a half-way house. They neither like full growth like Tom Selleck’s PI Magnum nor no growth, but fall headlong for a 10-day stubble as being the most comely for men. Movember allowed them but one day when they could look at their beaus and go pink with delight. But those in love with the mo, stache, mouser, muzzy, tickler — lip foliage as variously known — would do well to remember the cool adage: With great moustache comes great responsibility.
