Tail Event?
Talk about a tail event and disruption, Covid has been a tail event that nobody wanted and hair cutting salons in India are hard hit. While doing my own hair cut today myslef I was thinking if someone would have asked me pre Covid “Would you cut you own hair at home ever in your life by yourself?”
My answer would have been straight no. Almost everyone has a favorite barber shop and also a chosen barber to do the hair cut. Many times folks would return if the “chosen” barber was not there. People would go to classy salons that used to charge a hefty sum for a hair cut.
Consider this math, in a locality of about a lakh population there may be 5-6 barber shops. Assume about 50 thousand to be men who needs a haircut every two months. An average haircut plus a little head massage in Bangalore will cost you 250. So thats a revenue of 7.5 Crore/year of which I am not sure how much is being made since Covid started. I have not included the women folks but they splurge more than men on various things.
Historical Perspective
Hair dressing in India is quite an elaborate affair from the Harappan days. Here are some pictures. The Harappan priest had a fantastic hair do (someone has resemblance to this priest, I am not going to say the name :))
The famous dancing girl has her hair done in a fancy way.
The Yakshi from Mauryan Era with her elaborate head gear.
Generally if you are from high class historically you grow your hair long which was true for both men and women not only in Indian history but across the world. Common class men or people in army normally had their hair cut small.
I am sure that there would be tools and apparatus available to do such care for hair. Combs and some kind of scissors have been found in various excavations. The modern scissor that we all use have been in manufacturing from late 1700.
Method to madness
The easiest hair cut without any failure is to use a hair clipper and do a zero cut which is very much close to clean save and would last for months. Another simple method would be most of clippers give you a an accessory and some setting to control the depth of metal clippers, put it on some middle number cut your sides and back. Use a normal scissors to cut the front and upper parts as you want. You would need some support to get the back and above ears to trimmed with zero setting or remove the accessories completely. Some friend or spouse or someone else in the house would be needed for this. All this would not give a hair cut you want but one can manage.
The baldies would be happy this one time for sure. This must be one of the reasons for people to have this kind of hair cut in India earlier.
Share your best practices so that humanity can progress.
What Next?
I don’t know when but whenever we go back to normalcy from this Pandemic, remember that the Barber shops whoever has survived had a difficult time for couple of years. The price per hair cut will be hiked and it will no longer be 100-150 that is used to be. But we should probably not complain and let them recoup some of their losses.
This may be true for so many businesses and people. Life after Covid is never going to be the same. Some of the things that we adopted will continue for a while.
Hope that Covid-19 pandemic will not be forgotten by us like the 1918 Influenza pandemic that was almost washed out of memory of general public and history textbooks.