The great black beard of Uttar Pradesh

Here’s my beard/Ain’t it weird?/Don’t be sceered/Just a beard. That’s a poem by George Carlin. Google popped Carlin out along with the poem when told ‘beard’. Yes, you can talk to Google (if you’re of the mind) in your mind, that is. Can’t do the same with the great beard or shall we say the greatest beard there is where a maha (Maya?) battle is on for the finals to be played in 2014.

Not everybody can sport a beard. Some can get that growth flaring every which way while others grow them in patches, like cabbages, and yet others can rue the hormones and run fingers on a desert of cheek-chin-scape. Point is, do we have as our next prime minister a black beard? Don’t get all worked up. This here is not Blackbeard, the notorious and long dead English pirate, who plied his rapacious trade in the seas around the West Indies. The gentleman with the beard we’re talking of is Rahul Gandhi, India’s prime minister in waiting, if Digvijay Singh and a dozen other Congress leaders are to be believed.

So, what’s with Rahul and his beard? Is it part of a grand, well-thought out party strategy to ensure that a Bihar doesn’t happen in UP? Rahul is the only star-campaigner of any party in UP who speaks out of his beard. Mayawati, for reasons obvious in the name, and the attire, cannot have one even if she tried, which in any case would be too late an exercise to undertake. Then again, with her mentor Kanshi Ram never banking on facial hair growth to ensure poll victory there’s not much of inspiration there. So forget Mayawati.

Next is Mulayam Singh, a beardless Yadav icon ever since he took to politics, the SP supremo doesn’t have to speak out of a beard to get the attention of his lot; his manner of speaking so to speak is so precise that every word pops out chewed to cud. Either you pick them up at first hearing or you walk out deaf and dumb.  I doubt if Mulayam could ever handle a beard the way he handles crowds at his rallies, to keep their chins up. Ditto Yadav junior, the computer-monitor of the SP. Red-capped Akhilesh is as clean-shaven as his father though not shorn of ideas of his own.

The youth leader stepping into his father’s whatever the elder Yadav wears on his feet has a clean-cut face to add to a clear-cut strategy: cycle to rally after rally and that’s how you rally people to victory. At least in matters chin, he apes his father without a shadow of dark doubt.

Let’s dismiss the BJP with a hair here and a hair there. That brings us right back to the loaded-bearded question: Why the beard is Rahul sporting a beard? Nobody’s asked that question to him and no one popped it to Priyanka Gandhi. And it’s good it was never thrown at Robert Vadra, who would have shot his tongue out and held a motorcycle rally on it to explain his bro-in-law’s facial growth to the horror of the Election Commission.

To cut a long beard short, here’s 10 reasons why Rahul sports a beard, these days...

One, his regular barber in Delhi’s posh GK-II refused to accompany Rahul on his election campaigns.
Two, his forays into Dalit homes required that he display the spartan side of the great leader rather than the lavish one of the other.
Three, his schedule is so time-starved, precious minutes cannot be lost to mundane activities like shaving off a natural growth.
Four, taking a razor to the chin and throat is a violent act and no Gandhi worth the Mahatma’s surname would be seen indulging in that gore.

Five, Rahul knew that somewhere along the way Priyanka would be brought to campaign for his victory and he didn’t want to be mistaken for her/she for him, like identical twins!

Six, Sonia told him to be unlike Varun Gandhi who is as clean-shaven as the egg. In fact, Rahul is the first and only Nehru-Gandhi to sport a beard. Bravo!

Seven, he would rather be the lion bearded in his own den than sheep slaughtered in another’s pen.

Eight, the beard makes him look tougher, harder and mature and what UP needs (by extension India) is a mature and tough leader.
Nine, he’s just lazy when on campaign-mode; what razor?
Ten, the SPG wouldn’t allow a razor in anybody’s hand (his own included) near Rahul’s throat.

So, folks those are 10 reasons why Rahul has a beard. There could 10 more, or 20 or no reason at all — like Carlin said ‘Don’t be sceered/Just a beard’.