by ASGHAR VASANWALA
Dear friends
Religious restrictions are harsher for women than for men. When men flaunt restrictions, society turns blind eye but it is unforgiving for women. Many women remain behind the veil, however many of those men who enforce veil on their own women, enjoy lusting at other women. Many old men marry young women but when they die in a few years time, many of the widows are forced to shave head, wear white for lifetime, and are not allowed to wear jewelry and look beautiful. This article also brings out predicaments of Sikh women. Sikh women cannot remove any unwanted hair from face or body as other women do.
Growing beard is advocated in Islam though it is not compulsory. Urdu poets and writers have poked fun at beard. A Persian writer poking fun at Iranian Mullahs has written, “Mullahs grow long beard; for counter balancing the weigh of beard, they wear a big turban!
Elsewhere a poet has said:
Haseen tau husn ki hogi fidaee
Gawara kab ise iza rasai
Chubhegi hur ke galon mein beshak
Agar sheikh ne wahan dari rakhaee.
Below is an article from Los Angeles Times.
Asghar Vasanwala can be reached at asgharfv@gmail.com
A decision on the razor’s edge
by RAJA ABDULRAHIM
Nilofer Chariwala uses threading on the eyebrows of Stacie Negrete at Ziba… PHOTO/Anne Cusack)
On a busy sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles, Birpal Kaur threaded her way through a stream of women with perfectly shaped eyebrows.
She occasionally reached up to smooth her own — dark, bushy and untamed, hinting at a unibrow.
For six months, the 28-year-old Sikh had resisted the urge to have her brows groomed, as she had regularly done in the past. For observant Sikhs, the body is a gift to be honored by leaving it in its natural state. Maintaining kesh, or hair, is one of the five articles of faith as ordered by the 10th guru.
So she felt a bit guilty as she made the brisk eight-block walk to the Bombay Eyebrows Threading kiosk on 7th Street.
“It makes me feel kind of like a sellout,” said Kaur, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt and a hot pink tank top, her round face framed by long, dark tresses.
In a society where razor ads saturate the airwaves and Brazilian waxes are a common beauty ritual, keeping kesh can be a daunting struggle.
“Let’s put religion aside and be real,” said Sumita Batra, a Sikh who owns a chain of 16 hair removal studios across Southern California and Las Vegas. “Who … is attracted to a hairy-legged, mustached woman?”
The issue has much to do with the pressure to get married.
“The guys do the whole, ‘Wow, that’s awesome,’ ” when they meet a woman who keeps kesh, Kaur said. “Then they walk away, and you know they’re never going to date you.”
LAT for more