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Women want them perfect. Men want less flab. Breast surgery is the new rage.
Woo hoo! It’s Happy Cleavage Day. How should I celebrate?” tweeted Poonam Pandey on March 30. She did not get explicit about what she actually did on the “happy” day coined by a lingerie brand. But the self-proclaimed 21year-old, who shot to fame during the Cricket World Cup in 2011 by offering to run naked around Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai to motivate Team India, celebrates her cleavage every day. She posts pictures of her formidable bust line on Twitter and flaunts her assets in Youtube videos. Although she trashes the rumours, social-networking busybodies are busy figuring out the mystery of her breasts: “Did Poonam Pandey get a boob job done or not?”
Breast-watchers have found a new hobby: Tell real breasts from fake. On the 50th anniversary of breast implants, an Indian surgery secret is bursting out of the lingerie closet. The popularity of aesthetic surgery to enhance and reshape breasts is exploding in metro India, making it one of the top 10 countries globally. Cleavage is the new self-esteem. The market has expanded from socialites and film stars to upper and middle classes: Size-zero girls, wannabe brides, ambitious professionals to 40-something mothers. Despite a health scare over cancerous breast implants from France breaking out around the world this year, boob jobs are becoming something of a national pastime in India.
Men have their own rationale. “Doc, can you do something about my breasts? I am getting married next month. I don’t want to stand in a dhoti with my breasts hanging out.” The young man, a software professional in Bangalore, wants to remove his “moobs” (or male boobs). To Dr M.S. Venkatesh, surgeon and professor at Ramaiah Medical College, he is just another patient of gynaecomastia, where hormones, genes, and sedentary life lead to abnormal accumulation of fat on male chests. The doctor cut out his breasts through a small incision below
his areola (the small darkened area around the nipple). “Gynaecomastia is very common in Indian men,” says Venkatesh. “Most of these are fatty accumulation that starts mostly during late puberty.” When he started his career in 1994, he received merely 7-8 such patients in a year. Now, these comprise 35 per cent of all his surgeries.
Breast surgery has replaced the popular nose job in India in the last two years. With films, television ads, billboards and magazines showing six-pack male Adonises all the time and with new minimally-invasive surgery techniques within reach, men are reasserting their masculinity by taking recourse to new procedures in cosmetic surgery. A study by the Association of Plastic Surgeons of India reveals that male breast surgery has taken a giant leap of nearly 150 per cent in the last five years. At the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research ( PGIMER), Chandigarh, till a decade ago, patients were mostly women. “But over the last three to four years, men have formed one-fourth of the clientele,” says Dr Ramesh Kumar Sharma, who heads the department of plastic surgery. “Men have become more demanding and aggressive about the way they look.”
“I can’t turn you from size 32 to 36,” Dr Rakesh Khazanchi tells a patient. “But I want those,” his patient insists, pointing at photographs of a starlet with spectacular breasts. For the first time in a career spanning 30 years, the hunger for cleavage takes Dr Khazanchi by surprise. The director of plastic, aesthetic and reconstructive surgery at Medanta Medicity in Gurgaon tries to hide his dismay by sketching out the anatomy of breasts: “Normal breasts are shaped like tear drops. They are never perfectly round, never show cleavage without support and never jut out like that. Don’t trust photos.” As the patient retreats into a sulk, her anxious parents coax the doctor to enlarge her breasts as much as possible. Just another day at a cosmetic surgeon’s chamber.
It is 50 years since homemaker Timmie Jean Lindsey of Texas, US, was persuaded by doctors on the payroll of a chemical company to undergo the new operation. When and how it came to India remains shrouded in silence and denial. Dr Narendra Pandya of Mumbai, who has ramped up more celebrity breasts than one can count, recalls his first case in 1973: A stealthy midnight surgery on a patient whose face was kept covered and name secret from him. But in the last five years, the breast has become one of the most popular cosmetic surgery sites, reports the Association of Plastic Surgeons of India. In a country that lacks a national registry of cosmetic surgery procedures, sale of implants indicates the trend. There were 51,000 breast enlargement surgeries in India in 201011, out of 1.5 million across the world, according to an International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery survey. And women are increasingly opting for
larger 350-400 cc implants instead of the medium-sized 275-325cc.
In a first-of-its-kind study, Max Healthcare, Delhi, has analysed over 1,000 patients undergoing breast surgery in the capital. The study shows that the surge in demand is fuelled largely by the 25-45 age group, with 43 per cent women and 88 per cent men being unmarried. About 70 per cent men and 53 per cent women are socially and financially independent; 67 per cent come from the middle and 25 per cent from elite classes. And they are no longer the shy, diffident patients of the past. “Earlier, people used to pretend they were meeting doctors on someone else’s behalf,” says Dr Sunil Choudhary, head of aesthetic and reconstructive surgery at Max, who conducted the study. “Now it’s as direct as, ‘I would like to go for a breast surgery and would like to know more about the procedure’.” The demand for breast surgeries is rising here at 20 per cent every year,” he says.
On any given day, call in on a plastic surgeon and you will be taken aback by the range and scale of demands driving patients to doctors’ chambers. Dr Pandya of Mumbai would typically get a pretty young thing with an impossible list of demands ( one film star’s cleavage with another’s shape). In Delhi, Dr Choudhary says patients are wellinformed and often come after watching Youtube videos of real surgeries. “They are well-educated, new generation, independent, and most of them