On His Baldness. Extended Version.

This post is a reply to several queries defending my brothers hairscapades. Perhaps this will suitably illustrate the point I tried to make previously.

My brother has reached that stage in life where he is interested in his reflection. It is a highly disconcerting feeling for the rest of the family to notice the “baby” suddenly lifting weights, obsessing about oily food and haircuts, and generally being “the dude”. Most of it was alright, often good too. But it was the hair factor that killed us.
At first it was hilarious, then slightly amusing, and then completely exasperating. You see, my brother couldn’t be like other brothers and simply walk around looking like a partly denuded porcupine. Nooooo. His speciality was an obsession with his hairline. One fine afternoon, lightly dozing after lunch, the family was caught unawares when my brother announced, a la tragic hero declaring impending doom, “I’m going bald.”
We laughed and laughed. And he was very offended.
Hey, you can’t blame us! Blessed with a veritable jungle on his head, it took more than your average stretch of the imagination to notice any baldness. Everyday he’d he would point out a small indentation in his hairline and insist that recession happened (forgive the pun it was much too delicious an opportunity). It was when he began to tally hairs lost, that things began to get truly irritating. And admittedly entertaining as well. Family jokes on how he should get “Gulfgate” done, ran rampant. What was truly disturbing was that he actually took us seriously when we said this.
Several hair-brained ideas on hair loss later, we had the good fortune of going to Tirupathi. It is a known fact that one of the major prayer offerings there is one’s own hair. At the sight of all those bald heads my father had the brilliant idea of getting his son to go through with it as well (I offered, but we already know the family’s take on my hair length reduction schemes. [Humph!]). My brother had his misgivings but they were all demolished with a single sentence from the wily barber who was plying the razor. “Your hair will grow doubly thick.” He declared, pointing to his own shock of pitch black hair. Given such virulent proof, my brother bowed his head to the razor, doubts assuaged. True, the reflection in the mirror took some getting used to; but the pros outran the cons by miles. For one thing, the concept of combing was conveniently canned, as was the irritation of what another friend baldly described as “three pounds of mess” on one’s cranium. And with all due credit to the razor-man, the new hair growth did resemble a jungle (of course it always did, but in my brothers eyes there was ‘improvement’).
The gentle, logical reader may decide that this would spell a happy end to our hair-shirt days. But, as mentioned once upon a time in an earlier entry, my family –much like myself– defies all logic. My brother now spends half the year railing against his baldness and the other half requesting to go bald. And the sound you hear in the background is the hapless sister banging her head against the nearest hard surface.
You try figuring him out!