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Becoming Sara

Becoming Sara

11 mins
648


Sara inspired me the way no one has ever has! For this alone, I owe Sara this story of his transformation and evolution. None of us have choices at birth, and so was the case with Sara. His family was orthodox and his father always dressed in a white dhoti and shirt in the traditional South Indian Iyengar style. His brow bore the mark of Vishnu’s feet, or the Namam as it is called in Tamil. He grew a choti or a Kudumi as Tamilians would call it. He stood out in the crowd of a stylishly dressed and meticulously groomed multitude. Sara had no choice but to follow his father and soon became the butt of jokes in school.


The exuberance of youth scorns everything that goes under the name and label of tradition, and Sara and his Kudumi were the subject and object of great ridicule and fun in the school. With callous indifference to his tradition and faith, we made fun of his dress and hairstyle at will. Sara was subjected to every conceivable kind of humiliation with none of us trying to understand what he must be undergoing. If any of you ever had been the object of ridicule, I think you would understand Sara better. In our search for fun, we used to often pull at his ‘antenna’ much to his consternation.


Poor Sara had no option but to grin and bear it all. There were times, I remember, seeing Sara weeping bitterly, unable to take the humiliation heaped on him. In my rare moments of sensitivity, and I assure those were few and far between, I used to sympathize with Sara and console him that we guys were just joking and did not mean to hurt him seriously. In a bid to find a solution to end his misery, I even counseled him to give up the damn thing which had turned him into a joke, and grow hair like the rest of us. To respect whatever his religion wanted him to do, he could at best retain the dhoti.


I believe Sara spoke to his father about this and his father summarily rejected the idea. He was told that this was tradition, and there was absolutely no need to feel insulted and humiliated by those who could not respect or understand traditions. Sara did not leave the argument there. He demanded a reasonable explanation from his father why it was so sacrosanct to follow traditions. He cited instances of people adapting themselves to times, and traditions being modified to suit the present. He wanted to have more understanding about the relevance and benefits of sporting a traditional look and how it made any material or significant difference to his beliefs. His father, I am told, thrashed him soundly for his defiant stance and sentenced him to confinement without dinner for the day.


Sara had now become possessed with the thought of his Kudumi and consumed with the desire to get to the bottom of it; or rather on top of it, if you like the expression. Sara was no intellectual and he was always poor in studies. However, this one obsession of his was the result of his father being so insensitive and ignorant about such an important aspect of his life. Not that Sara misunderstood his father or lost his respect for him. He somehow, even with the limitations of his intellect, grasped the truth about his forefathers. He had understood that theirs was the generation of believers, and belief in anything requires a temporary or permanent suspension of the intellect. His father and his forefathers were trained to hold their questioning intellect in suspension when it came to matters of God and Religion. There was an implicit faith that what has been handed down to them by tradition was not to become a subject matter of debate and that the wheel need not be reinvented at all by reopening issues and questioning faith.


But not so for Sara and his generation; the history of mankind, without his conscious knowledge, had changed and he was part of the change. Sara, being the product of a more liberal and free India, grew up differently from his father. His intellect demanded logic and reason for various things that had been foisted on him blindly.


So one day he came to me and urged me to help him. He wanted to know everything about his religion and tradition, and he looked up to me for helping him in this quest for truth. I was taken aback for two reasons. One, the intensity and sincerity of his search for the truth; second that he came to me. Apparently, he took me as the chosen one in the mistaken belief that I understood him better than others, and therefore was worthy of his confidences. Hardly did he know that like the rest, I too sniggered and made fun of him, though I did show some amount of sensitivity (false though) to avoid hurting his feelings.


Anyway, Sara wanted me to help him find out about Kudumi for more than one reason. That he had serious doubts about family tradition and values was evident. If all this hoopla about attire and Kudumi was only the product of collective ignorance and superstition of his family and sect, he would gladly shave his head and be like one of us. But, if it were true that these things had more meaning attached to them than just silly belief, he would like to prepare himself for spending the rest of his life with the dhoti and Kudumi. To do this, and to decide on his choice, he needed the information to analyze and understand. And to his dismay, information was not easily forthcoming.


It was going to be the most defining moment in my life, though I barely realized it then. It would change the way I took things for granted. It would become one of the most valuable spiritual experiences for me. Looking back at that moment, I have a distinct feeling now that Sara was one of those messengers of God, sent to teach me some truths.


Whatever it was, I was determined to help Sara. Sara’s case was simple. To be or not to be a chotiwala. That is, to be traditionally attired like his forefathers or not. The object of this exercise, therefore, was to find answers that could convince him that the tradition and cult of Kudumi was either baseless and unnecessary or sound and true.


Now, tell me, how many of us have this dogged determination that Sara had for exploring and finding out the truth about things that mattered in his life? I realize that if we pursued our belief in God and seek the truths about life the way Sara did, we would all be enlightened souls ourselves.


Sara and I teamed up and haunted and hunted libraries for the information we were looking for. I read fascinating things about the history and origin of the Kudumi. That so much of thought and importance could be ascribed to the humble hair and its styling amazed me no end as I moved from source to source and drank in hundreds of articles and stories about the hair.


At regular intervals, we met and discussed what we had discovered about the Kudumi. It became amply clear that Kudumi was something not confined to the Brahmins and India alone. The entire world seemed to hold the tuft of hair in some awe. World over and historically, hair is something that has been looked upon as the symbol of power and energy. We read stories about how cutting or shaving of the hair amounted to shaming and humiliating a person who had committed some offence. We read how some traditions looked upon sacrificing hair as the ultimate offering to God.


We discovered how the shaving of the head was a ritual at the time of death in some communities. We learnt about the famed Chanakya and his Kudumi. We found out how some communities believed that the high point of your head symbolized the very entrance of god’s existence. Women had their heads shaved when they became widows. Men with rich hair growth were equated with strong animals with a mane. We read about the Japanese and Chinese who revered the Kudumi and how brave warriors cut off their Kudumi when staring at imminent death and defeat.


Sara was happy to discover all this and to find out that he and his sect were not alone in believing in the Kudumi. He was also happy at all the confusion about hair and how history kept evolving in belief about hair. But one thing we could never find out is the truth, some authentic reason for all that was being written about Kudumi. We could not find one single reason that could force Sara to continue with this tradition of Kudumi with conviction.


Now it was squarely upon Sara to either defy tradition or continue with it. I left Sara with his dilemma. Time passed and we went our different ways till he suddenly made his grand entry once again in my life. I was amazed to see the grown up Sara still with his Kudumi and Dhoti. I thought he would have given it up, after all those hard facts we discovered together. Sara explained to me that after a great deal of debate with himself, he had chosen to retain his identity, one that his family had followed over long years. He was no more, he said with firm conviction, ashamed to look like a joker amongst aristocrats. He now knew more about his Kudumi than the rest of the world and this made him feel superior. He told me that having a Kudumi had its own distinct advantages.


One, he was noticed by everyone everywhere. How many of us get noticed like Sara, I ask you? Sara also discovered that people took a greater liking to men with Kudumi like him than to others. Thirdly, his Kudumi gave him the opportunity to exhibit his superior knowledge. People invariably asked him about his hair and he would grab attention and mind space by his eloquent and elaborate analysis of the hair. He told me it paid rich dividends for him.


Technology had advanced now and the internet came handy. He had carried his passion for hair much beyond the Kudumi and had written books on hair styles all over the world. This had made him famous and his website, he told me, had maximum hits, and was very popular. People now seek his help in styling a theme for their hair. You understand hair themes, do you? Well, Sara informs me that this is the in thing. People want the Red Indian hairstyle, South Indian hairstyle, etc. And Sara is an acknowledged expert on global hair themes. He makes people understand why they wear their hair in a particular way and how history and tradition support their hair styles.


Sara has also done behavioural research on hair. How it affects your thoughts and actions. How certain styles can depress you and how others can cheer you up. How certain styles make you think in a negative way and how you can change your attitude to positive by simply changing the way you wear your hair. He says he has a large mass of evidence to support his theories. The famous amongst the world’s hair stylists invite him for lectures and training in hair styling.


To top it all, he was thrilled that he could defy his tradition! He explained that for a thousand years his father and his ancestors lived in the narrow belief that their hair and lifestyle had something to do with God; without ever being able to understand what the divine connection was, they had blindly wasted their lives without achieving anything. They had only succeeded in making a ritual out of what he believed now was a significant and important truth. It was Sara who had now broken the tradition of blind belief by discovering and enunciating hair styling. He had finally stumbled upon how hair is an important instrument for man to connect to the divine energies. And the world was ready now to accept this as truth, just as his father and his earlier generations had accepted some truths.


I was really and truly amazed by the transformation of Sara. He had made excellent use of a situation that seemed quite adverse and harmful for his life and had turned it into something beyond my imagination.


Sara tells me he has discovered God with my help. It was me who had acted as an instrument of rebirth for him. With amazing simplicity, he explained how he discovered God. He told me the process is simple, yet requires persistence and patience. It had all started with his hair and his obsessive thoughts about it. He believes God wanted him to understand everything that was to be understood about hair, and hence he sent me as Sara’s divine messenger. He was not a hairstylist or a barber, yet he was better than them. His obsessive persistence with the hair led him to discover a brave new world, where hair becomes a part of a person rather than something of a bother. As he started loving hair, the hair began loving him and leading him deeper into its world.


He says that the hairs are so grateful to him that they never stop raining name and fame on him. At this height, he could feel God in him, in his hair, in others' hair and everywhere. He now understood that God has made everything with a definite purpose. We manage to unveil only portions of his design and live our life with half-truths and half-lies which we manage to manufacture with our intellect. Instead of being ashamed of being black or white or having this or not having that, if we manage to understand what God has given us, we would be able to meet God himself at some stage.


I leave you to decipher Sara and his philosophy. I can just say this for Sara. He has opened up a whole new world of understanding for me and there is so much I have to do to become Sara.


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