I work and study in another city so I have
to travel home for functions and other things like letting my parents know I’m
alive, that I’ve not dropped out of my study programme and that I managed to
pay my rent on time so I wasn’t sleeping on the road.
I reached home yesterday for this awesome
party my Dad my arranged, for my sibling’s birthday. Yeah, I never got those,
but whatever. So, whenever I come home, I shave and travel because in my city
I’m pretty ok with a beard and don’t exactly look like I’m about to pounce on
someone on a lonely road but back home, there’d be a riot if my chin even has
the inkling of facial hair.
This time, before leaving, as I faced the
mirror, razor in hand, I thought to myself, “Let’s mess with the family.” I had
thought of the most shocking, jaw dropping, bottoms upping and outlandish idea
to blow the daylights out of the whole family by entering the party… with a
Hitler Moustache!
Left - Hitler and Right - Chaplin |
Well, the correct term for this badass of
the facial hair world is actually ‘the toothbrush’ but you can understand why I
would want to call it by its other name. Had I mustered the courage to pull off
this, what in the back of my mind, was still a brilliant stunt, I have no doubt
that I would have been ridiculed, shamed, laughed at and then ostracised for
being a complete idiot by the entire family, the neighbours, and basically my
entire city until I went and shaved it off. I’m glad that good sense prevailed
over my sense of tasteless humour.
The idea, as foolhardy as it might have
been, created a train of thoughts from the very perception that people have
about this particular moustache. True, it is associated with a man who tried to
wipe out a whole race of people because he decided that he was superior to
them. But is that really the fault of the moustache? Was it the moustache that
instilled a sense of supremacy in Hitler? Then why didn’t it have the same
effect on the man who was just four days elder to him and presumably as famous
as Hitler is notorious: Sir Charles Spencer ‘Charlie’ Chaplin.
Same as above. |
A German and an Englishman, living in the
same age, leaders in their own fields and sporting the same moustache, but the
collective consciousness only remembers the one who has done more evil and not
the one who brought happiness. It is not that I don’t realize the severity of
events or don’t understand the horrors perpetrated by Hitler, I’m just pointing
out that people may be more prone to violence maybe because it is an easier
choice than doing good. Even neutrality is akin to siding with the aggressor
and as Dante Alighieri put it, ‘The darkest places in hell are reserved for
those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crises.’
That may well be the reason that this
particular moustache is forever associated by with the name of Adolf Hitler rather
than with the most loved comedian of all time, Charlie Chaplin.
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