Bearded Philosophy

Your first day at college, you step into the place, all bright and energetic, your aspirations high and skyward, ready to make a mark, ready to make a difference blah blah blah.. you know where I am getting at, right? Anyways, you’re ready for college life, brimming with confidence, and why shouldn’t you be? You are wearing your most favourite pair of jeans which your mum picked for your 14th birthday. And ofcourse, you are sporting a very flashy moustache and look like the perfect gentleman. Unfortunately, one of your closest machas does the "right" thing, and lets you know that you infact look like a complete dork. It’s more to do with the moustache, he reasons. You have a choice here, break the guy's nose or disfigure your face. You choose the obvious and disfigure your face (and your friend laughs all the way to hell!).

First up, the clean shaven phase. It ofcourse embodies your pathetic attempts at being "cool". Obviously, it doesn’t work and you end up looking totally gay, now that’s a decent way of putting it. The tipping point would come at home, when your granny confuses you with your cousin, a 15 year-old girl!

So you decide to change and rightly so. The next logical leap would be the french beard. Everyone from Sachin to Rajinikanth has sported french beards on his way to stardom, why shouldn’t you? At first, it actually seems to be a pretty good choice but only then you notice that it’s probably the most common thing in the world. It’s not "cool" enough for you.

Then you move on to the goatee. Sure, friends back home would annoyingly tease you with that dumb four-legged creature with pointed ears which just happens to have the same name. But why do you care, you are doing this for yourself, right? right??

Finally you just give up and resort to growing a beard. Smart choice, hardly any upkeep as long as you can bear the itch. Whatever. But then you realize something. Why should you change in the first place? Do people's opinion really matter to you? Is everything we do just a response to things happening around us? How original are we? Or is our supposed ‘originality’ preserved in the responses that we give? Then again, what is originality?