{"id":582,"date":"2016-07-03T00:06:55","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T00:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=582"},"modified":"2016-07-03T00:06:55","modified_gmt":"2016-07-03T00:06:55","slug":"movember-testicular-prostate-cancer-moustaches-hipsters-no-shave-november","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=582","title":{"rendered":"Can We Please Cancel No Shave November?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><span class=\"dropcap\">I<\/span>remember a walk down Camac Street in Kolkata with Ananda, a man with a formidable moustache and a beard down to his knees. As I dodged the traffic and stares, he told me why he treasured his facial hair: Without it, he was a nondescript chap. But with it, he got questions (including racist ones) thrown at him all the time: \u201cDada, aapni ki foreign?\u201d \u201cDada, aapni ki magician?\u201d \u201cDada, ei re aapni ki Osama?\u201d (Brother, are you a foreigner? Are you a magician? Oh no, are you Osama?)\n\nA moustache on its own is so ubiquitous among Indian men, that unless it\u2019s truly spectacular it won\u2019t earn you the kind of attention Ananda got. Which is why, older Indian men seem to be rather flummoxed about the purpose of Movember, or Moustache November, a campaign that urges dudes around the world to grow their moustaches for a month and contribute towards prostate and testicular cancer research.\n\nIt\u2019s that time of the year when a large section of people on my Facebook feed begins rabbiting on about facial hair. This includes weedy juniors from college who say they will try hard to grow something on their faces this month to support the cause. And document their efforts with before\/after shots \u2013 <\/p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/MovemberUK\/?fref=ts\">to stop men dying too young<\/a>. Or, to echo the hipster-lingo-meets-NGO-speak of the campaign, \u201cGrow a Mo, Save a Bro\u201d. #Cancer, #Charity, #One Mission. The Beard Club of Bangalore is going all out, I hear, with a moustache competition at the end of the month with different categories \u2013 handlebar, combstache, and the Great Indian Moustache.\n\nIn 2006, my mother Vasudha Joshi, made a documentary called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=THXm7CPAVlg\"><em>Moustaches Unlimited<\/em><\/a> about the place facial hair occupies in Indian society. She pitched it as a lark, never thinking it would get funded, on the day her editor told her about being part of a four-woman band in Finland that wore moustaches on stage to feel more powerful. When the band was getting an after-concert drink one time, a big man in his 40s came up to her and said, \u201cYou think you look like a man, hmm?\u201d and ripped off her moustache. She punched him in his big fat beer belly.\n<blockquote class=\"quote--center\">An enthusiastic woman who loves beards vehemently defended Movember, labelling it a much more environmentally friendly stunt than the ice-bucket challenge.<\/blockquote>\nThis story got my mother to begin researching the subject. This was in Kolkata, so naturally, the first cultural allusion that a lot of people brought up was the Sukumar Ray poem \u201cGonph Choori\u201d, about a man who is traumatised when his moustache gets stolen one day. The shoot began with a bunch of women at our dining table passing around a Mangal Pandey-lookalike moustache, and trying to make it point upwards like Dali\u2019s. Someone asks my mother, \u201cHow do you feel? Empowered?\u201d She shrugs, and says, \u201cAmused.\u201d\n\nThe film moves on to Gorakhpur, where wrestlers with massive moustaches explained that not sporting a moustache is a way of signalling that your father has died, and that in a previous era, the moochh was so respected you could even pawn a hair from it to borrow money.\n\nIt also had a series of grave, stiff-upper-lipped men holding forth on moustaches being integral to their lives. An army cadet spoke of the authority their moustache gave them and mourned the loss of the value system among clean-shaven young men today; and an old Major General detailed how the Army Act, which held from 1860 onwards that every officer had to have a moustache, was altered after protests by new recruits. The men, who were enlisted to fight in France and Germany during World War I, declared, \u201cWe came to fight for the country, not to keep a bloody moustache.\u201d\n\nI couldn\u2019t help wondering what these men would have to say about Movember.\n\nNone of the people I spoke to had heard of the campaign, and when I explained, they pointed out its fuzzy logic. (The Movember Foundation\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/MovemberUK\/posts\/10153779095911017\">response<\/a> to someone\u2019s pertinent enough question, \u201cHow the hell will a moustache stop people dying too early?\u201d was less than adequate, and just listed the great work the charity does.) The unanimous sentiment was, ain\u2019t nobody got time for that, and they were unable to fathom why someone would pay to keep a moustache or how it would raise awareness.\n\n\u201cI can\u2019t waste time thinking about the facial hair of hipsters,\u201d said a friend who has always been clean-shaven. Another misconstrued my question as an attempt at campaigning, but made a succinct enough point: \u201cHey, if I want to contribute to something, I\u2019ll contribute. Can\u2019t be arsed with spending any time on this crap. Besides, I already have a moustache.\u201d\n\nOthers have a more considered, nuanced view. A journalist who had recited \u201cGonph Churi\u201d in <em>Moustaches Unlimited<\/em>, said three people in his family had died due to prostate cancer. He knows only too well how deadly serious the issue is and donates money to several cancer charities every year, but is utterly indifferent to someone choosing to shave or not to express their support. And a sociology professor broke down the deeper meaning of the campaign for me: \u201cThe thing about these gimmicks is that one more easily remembers the gimmick than the cause. It\u2019s a neoliberal version of consciousness-raising: so it seems more effective as a tool of indicating that you are a person who is aware, rather than furthering any cause. And it\u2019s linked to the spread of narcissistic, individualist cults. Look up the Marcusian paradox.\u201d\n\nThe dismissal wasn\u2019t solely from older generations. A friend my age told me wisely and wistfully, \u201cThis is what the politics of health looks like in the Instagram age.\u201d Unlike the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.locksoflove.org\/\">Locks of Love campaign<\/a>, which (apparently) uses hair donations to make hairpieces for cancer survivors, the relation of the moustache to prostate cancer awareness is oblique.\n\nAll it really does then, is rehash the machismo of army gents in an acceptable way (\u201cWe encourage every guy to Be a Man,\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bangalorebeardclub.org\/index.php\">exhorts<\/a> the Beard Club) using new-age provisions for self-obsession like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mensfitness.com\/styleandgrooming\/grooming\/movember-bros-can-track-their-moustache-progress-official-app\">Mo Tracker<\/a> apps, because you get to combine growing a magician-moustache to look suave as hell with making sure that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/MovemberUK\/?fref=ts\">no father outlives his son<\/a>.\n\nThe only indirect appreciation of the campaign I heard, was from a different quarter. An enthusiastic woman who loves beards vehemently defended Movember, labelling it a much more environmentally friendly stunt than the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alsa.org\/fight-als\/ice-bucket-challenge.html\">ice-bucket challenge<\/a>. Yet another friend who tried it seven years ago said he appreciated the fitness angle of the campaign but feared the money-raising bit was lost on desi hipsters.\n\nBut overall, moustache-growing or shaving never made a \u201cjhanter baal\u201d<em>*<\/em> of a difference to anyone\u2019s life.\n\n*Bengali slang for pubic hair.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It\u2019s Movember, the time of year when people on social media begin rabbiting on about moustaches. The campaign\u2019s money-raising bit, however, is completely lost on desi hipsters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":583,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[62,64,1040,1041,1042,1043,1044,1045,1046],"class_list":["post-582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-arre","tag-arre-originals","tag-beards","tag-moustache-november","tag-moustaches","tag-movember","tag-no-shave-november","tag-prostate-cancer","tag-testicular-cancer"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Can We Please Cancel No Shave November?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It\u2019s Movember, the time of year when people on social media begin rabbiting on about moustaches. 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