Mumbai Mirror

What is the world coming to? Ok no bullshit, let's cut straight to the chase ....

I was waiting to get my hair trimmed at a hair salon in Andheri when this fat, stinky, grumpy guy (henceforth referred to as Salman Khan) walks in ... Within 2 seconds of entering the store, he strips!! He then mutters something in Marathi to the barber who promptly takes his razor out and starts shaving hair off his bare chest.

I simply had to get a photo ... it was too tempting.



Just the sight for sore eyes eh?

The obvious question now is how I managed to get a shot of this without getting beaten up. I had to pretend I was sending a message to someone holding the phone vertically. This itself invited a suspicious glance or two from Salman. So, while in camera mode, I started pressing random keys to make it seem like I was typing. It seemed to work. He seemed satisfied that I wasn't upto anything fishy and he focussed his attention back on his chest, making sure that the barber wasn't running the blades over the dozen or so huge moles/warts that were adding to the beauty of the landscape.

All seemed to be going well ... I was getting proper focus while at the same time managing to stay out of trouble. I aimed, got a good view of the scene and was ready to press the Shoot button on my phone.

Miraculously, at this exact instant, I remembered that my phone wasn't on silent mode and that if I clicked, there'd be a rather loud sound of a camera clicking a picture (thank the geniuses at Nokia for this).

Feeling very proud of myself for having averted a possibly huge fiasco, I proceeded to turn my phone to silent mode and continued the mission.

I refocussed, and waited for the barber and the positions of the subjects to reach the perfect setting for a nice photograph. Something would always be wrong. Either the barber would obstruct my view, or he would take a pause and check the cricket score on the TV. After a long wait, things fell in place perfectly. The position of every object was just right.

Feeling satisfied that I was finally ready to go, I pressed the "Shoot" button and expected a silently taken nicely lit photograph.

The photo was NICELY LIT alright! There was a really bright FLASH!! I had forgotten to turn the freakin flash off!! Salman, the barber and half a dozen other customers who were waiting for their turn, all of them stared at me in disbelief!

Salman was angry, he was fuming! The barber was gaping open-mouthed. The other customers all put down their intellectually stimulating copies of Filmfare and Stardust instantly and watched in anticipation of extreme violence. Salman was abusing me with all the possible Hindi gaalis you can imagine. He was just about to get up from his seat.

I got the hell out of there as fast as my feet would take me! Salman chased angrily. He was muttering "Behen****, ch****iya" in an infinite loop like a tape recorder that was playing a tape that was stuck. I was hoping he would be too embarassed to chase me on the street in that bare bodied state. Fortunately he didn't chase me past the door.

I guess he felt too embarassed ...

Salman, if you do ever learn enough English and read this, I'm very sorry ... for all the barbers that have to shave your chest.