Do Bheega Zamin

Bollywood comos attempting new trend setting techniques from top to toe has caught the attention of the society and young in Bangalore

Dino Morea was sitting on in a focus group for a trend-forecasting company at which young professionals were asked about their grooming habits. Dino found he had nothing useful to contribute. His shaving regimen involves the use of a razor about as frequently as the seasons change. "Everyone else was chiming in about the products they use," said Dino Morea, the Bollywood actor famours more for his figure and muscles than acting. "I was totally mystified. I blanked."

Dino's idea of a style symbol, seriously, is of Ulysses S. Grant’s, whose beard he came to admire after watching the 2003 Civil War-era drama "Cold Mountain." Two years ago, when he began experimenting with different beard styles, which he described as ranging from neat to burly to unkempt, his facial hair was an expression of individuality in a tide of metrosexual conformity. "It's a sign of the times," Morea said. "People are into beards right now." At hipster hangouts and within fashion circles, the bearded revolution that began with raffishly trimmed whiskers a year or more ago has evolved into full-fledged Benjamin Harrisons. At a fashion held in Bangalore last month at least a half-dozen designers turned up with furry faces.

"This is some sort of reaction to men who look scrubbed, shaved, plucked and waxed," said designer Vedan, who stepped onto the runway after his "It's less 'little boy,' " Bradley said. "For a while men have looked too much like Boy Scouts going off to day camp." On city streets, too, trends in scruff have reached new levels of unruliness, a backlash, some beard enthusiasts say, against the heightened grooming expectations that were unleashed with the rise of metrosexuality as a cultural trend. Men both straight and gay, it appears, want to feel rough and manly.

With their fully furry chins the metrosexual manifesto, seem now to be endorsing a lumberjack ideal. "It's a nice masculine aesthetic," said Akash, student of NIFT, who watches changes in the trend in Bollywood. Suraya Narayan, the well-known industrialist and owner of several clublike grooming salons in Bangalore and Mysore, reports seeing newly bearded customers, but not enough to warrant concerns for the health of his shaving business. "It will be interesting to see over the next six to eight months what mainland America is going to do with it," Allan said. "For the past several years we've been stripping guys of their body hair. Maybe now it's time for the pendulum to swing the other way."
No survey ever conducted about women's attitudes toward beards, even those not underwritten by the Gillette Co., has indicated that more than 2 or 3 percent of women would describe a full beard as sexy. Yet the return of the wild beard carries a certain erotic charge that has been missing from beards since the Furry Freak look of the 1970s. Prashanth Chettiyappa, a designer of interactive Web videos, swears that having a beard has changed his life, giving him an air of confidence. "I met my current girlfriend a week after I started growing my beard in November," Chettiyappa said. Now he finds himself constantly touching and stroking the beard, as if it were a talisman. "It's like a security blanket on my face," he said.