The Importance Of A Good Haircut

For men, the barber is not just a haircutter. He is a therapist, beautician and philosopher, all rolled into one.

tinny radio, blue posters of Shah Rukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar sporting excellent haircuts and gazing seductively at the viewer? Actually, more than hair, it is beards that are in, thanks to Virat Kohli.

I think men like barber shops because it is the one place where you don’t have to think. Unlike fancy salons where men (and women) are accosted with questions about hair length, and whether they prefer the ‘fade and taper’ or the ‘fold over,’ a barber barely talks. You sit and he cuts. It is a male bastion without the testosterone, a comfortable space where nobody nags or asks questions. Which was how it struck me: it really isn’t about the hair, stupid.

Cutting hair isn’t rocket science. The trickiest portion for men is the section behind the ear, where you have to carefully shave away inches so that they can feel less hot. This has to be done neatly and in a straight line, difficult to do because you use one hand to pull down the ear as if it was the lip in those white canvas shoes that boys wear to school – the ones they clean with chalk. Well, the ear is to be pulled with equal force and finesse.

A good haircut is a thing of beauty. It makes a man look put together and confident. I should know because all my customers have looked like ghosts when they finally look in the mirror.

“I was going for the pompadour but it became an uneven buzz cut,” I say apologetically. “Shall I try a comb over?”

Most of them levitate out of the chair and escape.

LET’S JUST PUT IN EVEN BIGGER SENSORS

Yes, that would make sense, right? Let’s just increase the size of the sensors in our phones and make sure they use those millions of pixels well. Unfortunately, you won’t buy that phone as it will be about five times thicker than normal and really bulky. Even now phones are struggling to accommodate all the optics inside (which is why most phones have an ugly protrusion at the lens space at the back). To put in a bigger sensor would mean defeating the laws of phone body physics. Currently there is a limit to how big a sensor can be in a phone. There is no limit though, on marketing campaigns about how many megapixels a phone can have.

OTHER THINGS THAT MATTER

At one time photography was all about hardware. The lens (plastic or glass), number of lens, the aperture (the f stop; the lower the number the better, still very critical on all camera phones), the sensor within, the processor inside, the kind of flash and many others. While all this matters even now, software plays a huge role. Before and after you click that button to take a photo, multiple things are whirring inside your phone including image processing software, AI, neural network computation and machine learning. Sounds like a lot of headache-inducing tech geekiness, but believe me, that Instagram photo that got you so many likes? It’s all this tech inside that made it happen.

NEXT TIME YOU’RE BUYING A PHONE

Thus when you buy a phone based on how important the camera is to you, train yourself to not blindly go with a phone that touts some magic number of megapixels. Research the rest of the hardware, check the kind of software and then open your wallet.

I’m off to try the dual front selfie camera on the V19. Apparently it even teaches you how to pose :)