No Country For Shaved Men

If you are a hapless tourist in Switzerland at this time of the year you would be excused for thinking that the lack of facial hair on the male form of the human species is frowned upon here. All across Switzerland from Zurich to Geneva you will find bearded men (and maybe even women) silently smirking at clean shaven passers-by. You might think it's considered effeminate to not have one, maybe you will even try growing one yourself just to fit in, but this annual ritual has a much more 'logical' explanation. So what makes the generally quiet, reserved, peace-loving(and clean shaven) men of this country transform into beard growing, beer swigging brutes?? HOCKEY season!!!



Now you should know that 'hockey' in Switzerland means the one played on ice, with players skating on shoes with knife edges so sharp it would make the guillotine operators of the French Revolution proud. The objectives are also slightly different from the more traditional version of the sport which we Indians are more accustomed to. The less important one is to get a small black disc called a puck past the goalkeeper into the goal which looks like it's been shrunk by the mad scientist/dad from "Honey I Shrunk the Kids", while the goalie prowls around it like a bear protecting it's honey filled cave. The second and much more important objective is to maim and murder as many of the other team's players as possible. To fully illustrate this second objective here's a picture:




Another thing you should know is to never tell someone here that actual hockey is played with wooden sticks and a ball on a surface of grass or Astro-turf, and the bloody venture that they so fondly refer to as 'hockey' is infact ice hockey. I tried once and was almost bludgeoned to death.
Anyway, getting back to the point, during hockey season a very popular tradition is to grow a beard as long as your home team is still in the championship. As the tournament progresses and teams get knocked out you will see drastic reduction in beards, which occurrs in phases depending on which canton gets knocked out when. Ofcourse, this is not a great time for the women what with all the hirsuteness everywhere but i suppose they learn to take the rough with the 'smooch'...



This tradition got me thinking. What if this practice caught on in the cricketing world? What if fans decided to grow a beard until their team lost? One thing is for certain. Come Christmas, Australian men will be in high demand the world over to be Santa Clauses (or Santa Clausi, i am not really sure what the plural form of Santa Claus is) in malls and supermarkets for their prolific, all natural beards. But what about India? What would happen here if we were plagued by this insanity?


I let my imagination run wild, and by wild i mean as wild as a man-eating Royal Bengal tiger thirsty for blood (I know what you are thinking.. that i have too much time on my hands, to sit and imagine utter nonsense). This is what i came up with....


In a cricket crazy nation like ours, the tradition would be taken to extremes. Cricket fanatics, and there are a lot of them in India, would decide to grow their beards irrespective of whether the team is winning or losing, as a show of confidence in the team they consider the best in the world. This would in time lead to a new religion, and 'non-beardites' would be persecuted for not being patriotic enough. Politicians, being the weasels they are will try to use the situation to their advantage by classifying this latest addition to communal turmoil as a religious minority and then implementing a fresh quota system, all to garner a few extra (million) votes. Luminaries from other sports will cry foul about all the hullabaloo, as they do now, and nobody will really care about what they have to say, again as they do now. On the upside, the persecution will churn out a few new terrorist organizations against the 'beardists' and this will hopefully lead to better looking terrorists. (My opinion has always been that it's all good to talk about the genocide of infidels but who is going to take you seriously if you do nothing about the bird sanctuary growing on your face?)


The new tradition would land a big blow to the expansion plans of the ICC. The next big market for cricket in their opininion is the United States of America, but Uncle Sam is quite like my grandmom, they both don't approve of facial hair. The establishment there even considers a stubble to be a sure sign of an Islamic radical (my grandmom in comparison is quite liberal in her views).



Whatever the impact of this new religion, I think I'd be an ardent follower, not because i am a cricket fan, but because i consider shaving a terrible chore and an absolute waste of time. What better excuse to not do it? Now i have to figure out a way to counter the stiff resistance from my grandmom against my new found religious beliefs....