Susan Sontag (1933-2004), the acclaimed American essayist and literary theorist, can claim to have made a streak of gray in the jumble of thick-black tresses chic among women intellectuals, so much so that her style has now entered common lexicon: Sontag is now defined as coloring of hair a la the lady who lent the much-needed glamour to intellectualism. Among men, a spread of gray on a black top has always been considered tad sexy; a whiff of intellectualism, the George Cloonysh coolness… there’s something about it.
Might the Nepali youth, at least the ‘darker’ half of it, take some comfort from it at a time premature graying has become a norm among Nepalis? Apparently, a whopping 80 percent of Nepalis start graying as early as their mid-twenties, a fact the busy hairstylists in Kathmandu can vouch for.
Men, eastern folklore has it, never age. The proof? Their ability to bear children all their life as against Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex who are ´infertile´ as early as their late 40s. This makes evolutionary sense. The females of most species are biologically programmed to take care of their young. This is the reason, evolutionists believe, women are less driven to sex then men. To increase the chances of passing on their genes, men are programmed to leave behind as many progeny as humanely possible. Again the reason, in this crude evolutionary logic, why women are keen to highlight their virility as they age: Who, after all, wants to be evolutionary misfits?
Thus Nepali women, much like women all over the world, fuss a lot about their looks, spending much of their time pruning and preening their god-given manes. In today’s feminist lingo inspired by the likes of Sontag and Beauvoir this characterization will undoubtedly go down as the one last stands of the male-chauvinistic-pigs against women’s increasing assertion in the society. (In 2005, the then-Harvard University President Larry Summers got into soup by suggesting, most tangentially, that one of the reasons there were fewer women in science and engineering could be their natural affinity for family life.)
Worry not. The more egalitarian-minded Nepali men are out to level the battle field. For it’s not just anguished Nepali women who are paying top rupees for a flick of brown in their hair. Young Nepali men are as much into it (hairstylists in Kathmandu might again vouchsafe). But need they fret so much?
There is no scientific agreement on the reasons behind premature graying. What we do know is that the color of hair is a poor measure of a person’s longevity. In fact, not too far into the future graying might even be considered ‘normal’. Consider this: Back in 2000, the worldwide population of persons aged 65 (or above) was around 420 million; by 2030, that number is expected to balloon to 973 million. In a world of oldies, a young sod with a fancy black buzz might well be the odd man out.
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