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Comedian Sindhu Vee Dumped A Guy Who Called Her Hair Wild · We Are Spiraling

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Remember when I was in boarding school, first of all, as a boarding school in India and it was a really fun boarding school.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: And I got an A minus.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: Like I think I got a B plus in math.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: I joined choir and I trimmed my hair, and my mother took me out of the school.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: Oh my god.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: She was like, You are pretty much losing on all fronts.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: You didn't get an A, you joined this music singing, and you cut your hair.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I trimmed it out.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: And they brought me to school to Delhi to keep an eye on me.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: So they were very for them, the cutting the hair was the first, it was the beginning of the end, you know.
0:31
SPEAKER_02: This is Priya Annan, and we are spiral.
0:46
SPEAKER_02: She's one of the funniest people in British comedy right now, and her stand-up special, Sandhog, streams on Amazon Prime.
0:52
SPEAKER_02: You might also know her from her roles in the Pradeepes of Pittsburgh, Sex Education, and Roll Doll's Matilda the Musical.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and my hair's not looking very curly because it's been straightened recently.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, actually, before we start, Will, who is that sitting behind you?
1:08
SPEAKER_00: The most cutest curly person in the world.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: Lily, if you want to say hi, Queen.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Hi, Lily.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: And Lily's got such curly hair.
1:17
SPEAKER_02: That's Lily is perfectly curly.
1:19
SPEAKER_02: Actually, we did an episode about why some animals are curly.
1:23
SPEAKER_02: Which was just a fun way to do it.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: Lily.
1:27
SPEAKER_02: So tell me about your relationship with your hair.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: My relationship with my hair is complex because I growing up, my father uh was a South Indian, a Tamilan.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: So a very big part of beauty for women was long hair.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: And I was much younger than my sister, so I always had what in India is called boycott, you know, where my mother would just make a braid and then cut the braid off, and that would be my hair.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: But my elder sister had to grow out her hair.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: And then we moved to the Philippines.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: She went to American school and she really didn't want to.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: She wanted Farrafaucet hair.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: And that was a, I would say it was a traumatic event for her to cut her hair, like traumatic.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: Like my parents just lost their minds.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: And I think I was so much younger, I watched that thing and I was like, well, I guess I have to have long hair.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: So I just had long hair and I cut my hair for the first time when I was probably 24 and I was starting my PhD in McGill.
2:22
SPEAKER_02: Um Wow, 24.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: And this I had very long hair.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing about hair was Indian growing up in India, you had to have good hair.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: So there was, I'd never blow-dried my hair in my life.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: There was, you know, the twice-a-week washing your hair with all the stuff before, which really I'm very grateful for because at the age that I am and the stuff I've done to my hair, it's still doing really, really well.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, compared to a lot of women, you know, women my age are like, oh, I'm in menopause, my hair's thinning.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, my hair's never been this thin.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: And they're like, what are you talking about?
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Some of it is genes, some of it is India, and a lot of it is just the care that we were forced to take of our hair.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I don't think in retrospect it was really a hill worth, that was not the hill worth dying on for my parents when it came to my sister and their relationship with her.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: And we're not Sikh, so it wasn't religious.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: It was just a very South Indian idea of beauty, is long hair.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: And I've never, I rarely wash my hair without putting oil in it, and I still can't really do it.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: I find it very difficult.
3:28
SPEAKER_02: That's your pre-wash go-to, night before or right before?
3:32
SPEAKER_00: No, I do it like a couple of hours before I wash my hair.
3:36
unknown: Okay.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: And I didn't start using conditioner till I was in my 20s.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: Oh wow.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we just didn't use a lot of product.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: We washed our hair, we kept it clean.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: You don't mic my daughters now, especially one of them.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: She's got like a pre-shower or this shower, you know, pre-she's ruining her hair.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: She blow dries it, she goes to school, she has curlers.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: She's gonna, she's gonna be, you know, she's gonna be in the position that most young women, especially in the West, are in now, which is they're 30 and they're like trying to do things to get their hair to work.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: Well, you've blasted it out of its roots your entire teenage years.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: Your hair can't withstand that.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: But you know, it's hard for me to watch because my girls are born with great hair, and one of them is steadily ruining it.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: What are you gonna do?
4:22
SPEAKER_00: That's not the hill I'm gonna die on.
4:24
SPEAKER_02: You saw it in action, so you became aware very young that culturally good hair was important.
4:30
SPEAKER_02: But what did good hair mean?
4:32
SPEAKER_02: Because it means different things in different cultures, right?
4:35
SPEAKER_02: I mean, Chris Rock did a whole documentary about good hair for yeah, and I watched it.
4:38
SPEAKER_02: It often actually means straightening your hair.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
4:42
SPEAKER_02: So what did it mean in your culture?
4:44
SPEAKER_00: In Indi, in South India, it meant long hair, hair that you didn't expose, you didn't wear it out, you as in you didn't wear it open, you always had it braided.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: Um you put oil in it, you kept oil in it, so you put oil in it, washed it, but you also put orange peel, envla, I don't even know what that's called in in in English.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: And then it was just yeah, okay, there you go.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: And also, my mother used to say your plait should be the same thickness from top to bottom.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: That's good hair.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: So we had very, very thick hair.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we took very good care of our hair.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Very good.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: Do you still do that?
5:24
SPEAKER_02: And you still do that now, you said you still do the oiling?
5:26
SPEAKER_02: I yeah, yeah.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a habit.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: It's like brushing my teeth.
5:31
SPEAKER_02: What about the relationship your hair played in did your hair play a relationship in your sort of inner life?
5:38
SPEAKER_02: And you're special, you talk about how getting a haircut.
5:41
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes if you get a dramatic haircut, people are like, what happened to her?
5:45
SPEAKER_02: Like, what happened in her life?
5:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, first of all, are we only talking about head hair?
5:50
SPEAKER_00: We can talk about all of it.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's the thing growing up in India is like where Indians, or at least I think most Indians I would say, I can't speak for all, you know, we have great hair, but we have it everywhere.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: So from a very young age, you know, every like every 11-year-old girl I knew kind of had a mustache, like a mustache that most grown Danish men couldn't grow in a year.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, we had that.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: And then you started that whole ritual, you learned it from your older cousins, threading, waxing.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: No one shaved when I was growing up.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: That was like men shaved.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: So it's it's all the pain around hair removal, depilation of hair.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: It's a huge part of growing into being a presentable young woman, is to get depilated.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's so the same mothers, at least in the case of the mothers I knew, including my own, they didn't want you to wear makeup.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: They wanted you to oil your head hair, but they also wanted you to make sure you waxed and threaded and like got rid of.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: And my mother used to bleach my face because I had hair over here, um, which didn't really work because I'm dark.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: So I look had blonde hair on my face.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, but it was like, no, because they didn't want to wax facial hair.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: That wasn't considered right.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: So there was so much around hair, and there was like, it was like you had to do a lot to keep some hair, and you had to do a lot to get rid of some hair.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: You were always battling your hair.
7:16
SPEAKER_02: Your whole life revolves around your hair, whether it's like keeping it or trying to get rid of it.
7:22
SPEAKER_02: Quick break.
7:23
SPEAKER_02: I make this show because I believe hair is part of our story, and I'm building a curly and wavy hair care line called Myura with the same ethos that curly hair isn't something to tame or manage.
7:32
SPEAKER_02: It's something that makes us distinctive and captivating.
7:35
SPEAKER_02: That's why I chose the name Myura.
7:37
SPEAKER_02: It's Sanskrit for Peacock.
7:39
SPEAKER_02: You can find out more at MyuraBeauty.com.
7:41
SPEAKER_02: That's M-A-Y-U-R-A-Beauty.com.
7:45
SPEAKER_02: Okay, back to my conversation with Cindhu.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I would say an in a very big part of being a beautiful young girl or a presentable, forget beautiful, presentable young girl revolved around what are you doing with your hair.
8:00
SPEAKER_02: You know, and I was lucky I think this still applies to brown girls of of my generation too.
8:05
SPEAKER_02: This is all very familiar.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I mean, you know, when I came to the West, everyone shaved.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I'm not doing that.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: But I you couldn't just walk into a hole in the wall waxing place.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: So I was like, where can I get waxed?
8:19
SPEAKER_00: And in England, people were like, What's waxing?
8:22
SPEAKER_00: It was so rare at that time when I moved here in the early 90s.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: So I was like, oh shit, you know, what am I gonna do?
8:28
SPEAKER_00: And I would go far out and find, I never have shaved.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: It just I'd like I was like, I'll be hairy.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: It was like this thing about, and now, you know, it's like there was this always this talk when I was growing up about not wanting to look like a boy.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: You don't want boy hair.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: If you shave, you'll get boy hair.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, what's boy hair?
8:53
SPEAKER_00: But obviously, no one wanted boy hair if you were didn't want to be a boy.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what I mean?
8:57
SPEAKER_00: It was like, okay.
8:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
8:59
SPEAKER_02: By the way, I was um, I I my parents put me in Indian dance classes when I was a kid, and we were lacking in little boys in dance class the first few years I was there.
9:08
SPEAKER_02: So they would find any girl they could turn into like a little seek boy would become a little seek boy for the sake of the dance.
9:15
SPEAKER_02: And that was me because I had long curly hair that could be put up uh into a little baby turban.
9:22
SPEAKER_02: And so it was also this idea of like, oh my god, as a kid, I was made the little boy.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: But your older cousins, the girls that you respect you you wanted to be like, they were like, Yeah, this is what happens.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's how it's passed on.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: And I don't, you know, I I don't know about okay, let me put it this way.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh when I showed up in the West, yes, there was a lot more freedom, but women were still doing 150 different things to their hair to be attractive.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: And of course, all the things they were doing I thought were wrong.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: They were heating it and straightening it and conditioning it and putting chemicals in it, and it was like, this is not gonna work for you.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: And I was right, most of them had like five hairs that they would try and blow dry into shape, whereas I had all this hair.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: However, the idea that because I was told to do it, I was worse off.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: I never bought that.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, all these girls that are Caucasians or English, they may not have been told to do it, but they still chose to do it because they knew they kind of had to.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, the line of authoritarianism was more direct in my case.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: You did what your mother told you, you did what your elder sister told you.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: Right.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: The idea that Western women were all doing it out of freedom, I was like, not really.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: Just the line is more like this.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: Like they're being fooled.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: Because I don't think women need to have no armpit hair to be beautiful, but we've all bought into it.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what I mean?
10:54
SPEAKER_01: We've all definitely bought it.
10:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:56
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't matter if you're white or brown.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: It's just we didn't have to, we weren't kidding ourselves.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: It was something your mother told you to do, so you did it.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: And your mother was like, Society's gonna make you do it, so I'm gonna tell you to do it first.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: Whereas my I remember discussing with some of my Western friends at the time that I was forced to get my threading done by my mother and my aunt, crying and wailing.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: And they were like, Oh my God, that must have been so hard for you.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Well, yeah, it was.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: But it for a while I bought into it that, oh, I was forced, whereas they're not forced.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: But I don't think they had a choice either.
11:34
SPEAKER_02: You know, everyone's conditioned on their own, whatever the standard of beauty is that they've grown up with.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I don't think it's any worse that your mom told you to do it.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I'd rather my mom told me than me kidding myself that you know it's the patriarchy and I didn't figure it out.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: My mother was like, it's the patriarchy.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: She literally used to say to us, if you want to get married, if you want to get respect from men, you gotta follow these rules.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: Boom, end of.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: Now, that may not have been right or wrong, but she wasn't saying anything different than Grazia magazine, except Grazia magazine is also talking about feminism.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: Right.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: You know, so I feel like I grew up with that.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: I came here and it allowed me to think about it.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: And then I thought, okay, this is how I want to do it.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you what, when my girls, who are half white, went to school, they were quite hairy and very young, they wanted to get rid of it.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: And they went to school with other South Asian girls whose mothers let them wax when they were 10.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: And I didn't.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: And my 10 is young.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but these girls were getting made fun of in school, and you know, and their mothers had they were they had they carried this kind of, oh my god, we're so different.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: And 10, 11, 12, and I just said no.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: And my daughters hated it, but I was like, first of all, it's how we are, and I'm sorry that you're half-white, so you've got really dark hair, but one day you're gonna be happy that you have this kind of hair, because they both have glorious hair.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: And I said, and you've got to you've got to find that stuff in you that is your character before you start all of this stuff, otherwise you'll never know who you are because you'll be hiding behind one form of makeup, hair, blah blee, blue.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm trying to say?
13:28
SPEAKER_00: And I think that I didn't have to do that because I grew up with little girls who were just like me.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: So and none of us got our hair removed, but it did mean that we kind of were comfortable with our body hair until we weren't, but we were older.
13:44
SPEAKER_02: No, I hear what you're saying.
13:45
SPEAKER_02: It's that you need to have your center of gravity and know who you are before you can feel comfortable making decisions, manipulating that and being okay with who you are in whatever format.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and also I don't think it's right to, in my opinion, for such a young child to get the message that I need to kind of have a body like white girls.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: You're not.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: We're ha you're half Indian.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: Lean into it.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, it's hard, but understand the benefits are you're gonna have 10 times as much hair on your head.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: Right?
14:18
SPEAKER_00: So I wanted them to understand that because I never wanted them to feel like if I had blonde hair on this light skin, my life would be easier.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: No one's life is easier because of hair color and hair skin necessarily.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: Necessarily.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: It's how you feel within it.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: It's how you feel.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: And of course that way.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: Let me, there have been times in human history, even now, when certain colors of skin and certain hair types and all you get discriminated against.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: That wasn't the case with my kids.
14:45
SPEAKER_00: They were self-conscious because they were different.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: And as a child, you need to learn to fight for your space within that difference.
14:53
SPEAKER_02: I mean, my whole generation, we got rid of our eyebrows, made them the thinnest possible things.
14:58
SPEAKER_02: And then back when I was in my 20s, it was like reverse, we're gonna go back to eyebrows.
15:02
SPEAKER_02: Everyone wants their eyebrows, and and all of us have been, you know, threading them into oblivion since childhood, going thinner and thinner and thinner after, you know, the early 2000s look on friends.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I I invest a lot in my hair and my body hair and this hair, and I I'm not someone who has hairy armpits.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: I never have, I never will.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: It's my choice, but I wanted my daughters to sort of feel the discomfort and then decide how they want to proceed because part of the hair thing with them was also part of their ethnicity.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: And I didn't want that to I wanted them to spend some time thinking about it a bit.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, and some and often disheveled.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: Well, I made the decision for them because they were still 10 or 11.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: So when they were 14, I was like, yeah, fine.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: Because by then they'd spent enough time thinking about it.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: And they also were able to look at girls that were fully Indian and be like, oh my God, because they were a bit less hairy than them.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: And those girls came with other things, different names, different this, different that.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: It's important to really locate yourself in your difference.
16:20
SPEAKER_02: How did your relationship with the hair on top of your head change when you moved to the UK?
16:27
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I didn't cut it when I was in the UK at all.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: You have to remember when I was in boarding school, first of all, I was a boarding school in India and it was a really fun boarding school, and I got an A minus.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: Like, I think I got a B plus in math.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: I joined choir and I trimmed my hair, and my mother took me out of the school.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: Oh my god.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: She was like, You are pretty much losing on all fronts.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: You didn't get an A, you joined this music singing, and you cut your hair.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I trimmed it out, and they brought me to school to Delhi to keep an eye on me.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: So they were very for them, the cutting the hair was the first, it was the beginning of the end, you know.
17:01
SPEAKER_02: The first sign of rebellion.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: Especially because my sister had done that.
17:05
SPEAKER_00: She made her hair pink and all this stuff when she went to America, and they were like, holy cow.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, well, when I left, um, you know, when I first left India, I was on a scholarship.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was always on a scholarship, but I didn't have time to think about my hair.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: So I used to just wear it in a bun and I used to put a pencil through it.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: But the whole world around me here was like, look at your hair.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Because it was long, it was below my butt, it was great.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: I didn't blow dry it.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: So I didn't read, I mean, I look back and I think I could have been in ads for hair.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: It was so gorgeous.
17:38
SPEAKER_02: And it's all- It sounds like it was long, flowing, curly, wavy.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: Incredible.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: But I it was super wavy, but it would like curl up after I'd washed it, and then it would get wavy.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: But I would just have it in a bun and I played basketball, so I had it in a braid.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: And then it was only in my mid-20s when I got to McGill that I really was it in McGill, no, it might have been University of Chicago, so I might have been 26, where I was like, Oh, I want to style my hair.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: I started thinking about that.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: And I think it was some kind of renaissance on my part.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: I got lenses and I don't know what was going on.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: I have a friend, Farah.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: Shout out to you, Farah Godrich, who was like, You need to get rid of those glasses, you need to fix your hair.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: She'd been, she's Indian, but had been in America for years.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: And she was much younger than me, four or five years.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: But she was like, bro, fix this look.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: What is this look?
18:25
SPEAKER_00: And I did, and that's when I cut my hair to here.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: I literally felt huge changed.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I took this much hair off.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: I was like, that's it, I'm done.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: And then since then, I've done whatever I wanted.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: About once every two years, three years, I cut my hair into what's called a boy cut.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: I just like take it off.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: And um, and then it grows back.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: And now it's in this, it's in the middle of growing right now, actually.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then it'll grow and it'll come to here, and then I'll get fed up again.
18:54
SPEAKER_00: And but you know, I have extraordinarily obedient hair.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: You know, I have the hair.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: If my hair was my parents' daughter, daughters, they would have been like perfect.
19:05
SPEAKER_00: It just does what it's told, you know?
19:07
SPEAKER_00: Just does what it's told.
19:09
SPEAKER_02: So when your parents pulled you out of that boarding school, yeah, they noted that the hair was part of it.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
19:15
SPEAKER_02: My mother was like, You're gonna trim your hair sign of things going downhill.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, big time, big time, big time.
19:19
SPEAKER_00: Because we had a rule that you shouldn't cut your hair.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: It's good to have long hair, and I cut my hair.
19:26
SPEAKER_02: What was your mom's hair like?
19:27
SPEAKER_00: My mom just had hair till here.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: She colored it.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: It went white very early, so you know all the Indian moms really used to color their hair because they didn't want to have white hair.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: It was till here, she kept it in a bun, it was very dry, it wasn't particularly nice as such.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: Um but she had it in a braid or she had it in a bun.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: She was very fashionable, but in those days they used to have those buffanti buns.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: She did that.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, she didn't give herself much credit for her looks or her hair.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: She should have, but she didn't.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: She was busy.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: She was studying and becoming a therapist and all those things.
20:05
SPEAKER_02: And what was your dad's hair like?
20:06
SPEAKER_00: My dad had jet black hair.
20:08
SPEAKER_00: He was a South Indian.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes he wore it long when they were like when I was young, my mother had uh long hair and a braid, and she would always have this ring let out.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: And my dad had curly hair till here, and they would throw these parties.
20:24
SPEAKER_00: I remember he would wear a batik shirt, they would make drinks.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: They were both very fashionable in their own way.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: But he had great hair.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: My dad pretty much had black hair till he died at 89.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: He just kept going bald, but it was still very black.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: He didn't have a lot of, but he put oil in his hair every single day of his life.
20:42
SPEAKER_02: What type of oil was he putting in?
20:44
SPEAKER_02: Coconut.
20:44
SPEAKER_02: Coconut oil, same as you.
20:46
unknown: Okay.
20:47
SPEAKER_02: This is a big part of culture.
20:49
SPEAKER_02: Did your parents give you um hot oil head massages when you were growing up?
20:53
SPEAKER_02: Was that part of it, or did you just do it yourself?
20:55
SPEAKER_02: Because I definitely uh received, despite being born and raised in New Jersey, um, I definitely got the hot oil head massages.
21:03
SPEAKER_02: And I wish I appreciated I loved them back then, but I wish I could have them even more often now because I don't live near my family.
21:09
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, oh my God, what a privilege that was.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: No, I give it to my kids.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: I used to get it, mommy.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: Like every once in a while, mommy would say, Come sit down, and then she would give us a massage.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, I did it myself.
21:21
SPEAKER_00: Maybe when I was young, I probably was getting it from her.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: I can't.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: But you know, I had short hair and they were very preoccupied with my sister's hair.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: I was kind of left alone, really.
21:30
SPEAKER_00: But I gave it to my kids.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes, like I think the last time I gave my one of my kids a hair massage, they were already in university.
21:37
SPEAKER_00: One of my kids is in university, and they'd come home and I was like, let me put tail in your ball.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: And they were like, Okay.
21:45
SPEAKER_02: So they were your parents were preoccupied with your sister's hair because for her it clearly did become a form of rebellion.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: She was the eldest.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: You know, eldest children in many South Asian families, as you know, will either comply or rebel.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: They tend to not have a middle path.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: When you have these.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Indian families which move abroad, the elder one is either the perfect one or completely goes off the effing reservation.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: She chose this.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: And they were just like, Holy shit, it wasn't just her hair shed, a boyfriend called Mike, blah, blah, blah.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: They were like, and I was just in the background being like, doo-doo doo.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: I was much younger.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: But I remember being like, if you get a boyfriend, don't tell them, and certainly don't cut your hair because these two will go batshit.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: What's the most dramatic change you've made to your hair in your life?
22:29
SPEAKER_01: And did it signify something going on?
22:31
SPEAKER_00: When my mother died, I cut my hair real short.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, she died in the end of 2019.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: We were very, very, very close.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, she became a therapist.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, she was not like your typical Indian mom.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: I cut my hair super short, super, super, super short.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: Like a boy.
22:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I should find a picture if I can.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh, super boy.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: I think that's the most dramatic haircut.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Oh, when I became an investment banker and I came back from America to England, I got a haircut till here, but it was still very like it was very uh there was a woman called there was a haircut that all of them had, Princess Die had, and Jill Dando, who by the way was murdered.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: I suppose some might say so was Princess Die, allegedly.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: Don't want to cause any controversy.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: Um, so it was this cut, and I came here and I went to a really posh hairdresser because I was joining banking and I had like student hair really.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: And uh he gave me this haircut, which was like it was kind of like at some point when Rachel had short hair on friends.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: Remember that kind of hair, like of course, yeah.
23:35
SPEAKER_02: So I had iconic hair the whole series.
23:38
SPEAKER_02: Anytime there was a change, we know.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I had that for a while, and then I grew out because I was too complicated.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: You had to like blow dry it and keep it.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: I was like, what is this?
23:47
SPEAKER_00: And um, by then I'd sort of become trained to be someone who just tied up their hair.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I just short hair.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: I say it in my special, short hair requires so much more care because it's not listening to gravity.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: It's going, you're like, what?
24:03
SPEAKER_00: Whereas long hair, you just do this and it's settled.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: And then and then I got that haircut when mom died uh at the beginning of 2020.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted, when I turned 40, I wanted to donate my hair in Tirupati at the temple, which in India many South Indians do.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: You shave your head.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: And you shave your head because a lot of your ego lives in your hair.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to do that because I was 40 and I, you know, I have certain beliefs, and but then turns out you can't do it if you're married.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: Oh, really?
24:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, married Brahmin women can't do it.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it's just why is that?
24:40
SPEAKER_00: Because widows have to shave their heads, so it's inauspicious.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: So my parents were like, You're not doing that.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: My husband was like, You want to shave your head?
24:49
SPEAKER_00: All the kids in our kids' school are gonna think you have cancer.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: Because in the West, that's what shaved head means.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: Whereas in India, it's many pious people shave their head.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: And you usually shave your head and you sort of make a vow, you you ask for something, or it's a vow.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: It's like, if I give you my hair, can and I had lots of those in my head, but I didn't shave it.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: But I would have, I mean, I still would.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: I've I it would be so liberating if I could shave my head.
25:16
SPEAKER_02: So you were basically faced with resistance all around from everyone in your family.
25:20
SPEAKER_02: Your parents were like, no, this is inauspicious.
25:23
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh, everyone else in society said, No, it's inauspicious.
25:26
SPEAKER_02: Your husband was like, Everyone's going to think you have a life-threatening ailment.
25:29
SPEAKER_02: Um, I wouldn't have listened to him too bad for everyone.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't have listened to him at all.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: And my kids, I would have been like, You need to get over it.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: Go and read about Indian culture and teach your friends.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: But my parents, when they talked about the inauspiciousness, yeah, I believe in those things.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, oh damn.
25:46
SPEAKER_00: So I didn't.
25:47
SPEAKER_02: And when your mom passed away, was shaved was cutting your hair short.
25:53
SPEAKER_02: I know in many cultures, and I'm I should know this about Hinduism because my family is also Indian Hindu, but um boys shaved their head when their fathers die.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: Ramic boys, especially.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: But that had nothing to do with that.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: I just needed change.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: Okay You wanted to feel like it was a new chapter or something.
26:15
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to not kind of I needed something.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: The thing with cutting your hair or having a dramatic haircut and I think lots of women understand this, and you've already said I said it in my special.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, people break up, they go get a new haircut.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: People hair hair change signifies a change not just in appearance, but there's something about changing our hair that makes us feel re-equipped to do something.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: You know, like I say in the special, you cut cut your hair, you come out, you're like, my whole life is gonna be different now.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: And it's definitely always had that for me.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: Um so I think when mommy passed away, it was like I want everything.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I think it was a kind of a way of it was like a giant tantrum.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: I was so sad, and I wanted it not to be the way it was.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: So it was like yeah.
27:29
SPEAKER_02: You need a physical representation as well of the fact that everything felt different.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: I was like, let's get rid of all this shit.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: Plus, also, I'm very confident my hair grows back, you know?
27:44
SPEAKER_00: You you know it's gonna stick around.
27:45
SPEAKER_02: It's the it's the genes, it's the decades of oiling.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's it's good genes, you know, and I trust my hair.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: I think of all of my features, physical features, my greatest.
27:58
SPEAKER_00: You know, when you have more than one child, you realize one of your kids is very reliable.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: They're the ones who are not.
28:04
SPEAKER_00: I was that kid for my parents, and my hair is that for me.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: I can always rely on my hair to look amazing.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: I can rely on my hair to behave, I can rely on my hair to get all the compliments, even if I haven't paid it any attention.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: I was that kid to my parents.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: My hair is that to me.
28:23
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:24
SPEAKER_02: When you were an eye banker, how did that?
28:29
SPEAKER_02: You've had so many different chapters in your life and vastly different sort of careers and environments.
28:37
SPEAKER_02: And something I've found at least in creating this show is, you know, one episode that I did at the very start was called Why Are So Many People Secretly Curly?
28:45
SPEAKER_02: And as an Indian woman, you might see this all around.
28:48
SPEAKER_02: I saw this all around growing up.
28:49
SPEAKER_02: Like people who had hair just like mine at a certain age, right?
28:53
SPEAKER_02: Around that middle school time, would start straightening their hair.
28:56
SPEAKER_02: And I somehow resisted the pressure.
28:58
SPEAKER_02: I think because my mom was always like, This is what makes you you.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: And also, it just like you mentioned this in your special about waxing your body hair and controlling all your body hair.
29:08
SPEAKER_02: It takes a lot of effort to straighten your hair if you have Indian curly hair.
29:12
SPEAKER_02: It hurts your arm.
29:13
SPEAKER_02: So I resisted that, but I'm curious throughout your different career points, going from banking to now as a stand-up comedian, you know, how does your hair play a role in that?
29:26
SPEAKER_02: A lot of people, when they go to work in an office, they decide, I want to look quote unquote professional.
29:32
SPEAKER_02: And so my hair must look a certain kind of way.
29:35
SPEAKER_02: Like I'm I'm office Barbie now, you know?
29:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
29:39
SPEAKER_00: Very good question.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: I so like I said, when I started and I was with all these other people who had done MBAs, and I had I dropped out of a philosophy PhD.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: So I was from a very academic background, and they were all like, This is the lipstick you buy, and these are these suits you buy, and this is the hair.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: I was like, holy crap okay.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: So I did that hairstyle, and then it was just too complicated to make it work.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: So I would like put pins in very quickly.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: I went back to hair that was long.
30:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was that shorter cut, right?
30:06
SPEAKER_02: That you had to straighten it, yeah, yeah.
30:08
SPEAKER_00: That I had to kind of keep it blow-dried.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: And I've never blow dried my hair, so I didn't, I couldn't do it.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: So I would have to go somewhere cheap once a week and be like, Can you do something like this?
30:17
SPEAKER_00: And then just keep it.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: And I have very dry hair, so I never had gross hair and I never go to the gym.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: So there was no question of sweating.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: And I live in London, it's not hot.
30:25
SPEAKER_00: But then very quickly, I went back to my long hair.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: And I also realized how little I knew what I was like, the banking.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: So I had to really focus.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: So I was working on weekends, teaching, you know, not teaching, but working out what's going on.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I worked on a trading floor.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: So very quickly, I went back to having my hair in a bun.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: And I didn't really care because a bun is pretty neat and tidy, but I still oiled my hair twice a week.
30:51
SPEAKER_00: And that was a religious experience for me.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: I was not gonna like just leave my hair.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: I had very long hair again, it grew super fast.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: I was in my late 20s, like everything was, you know, everything was very fertile.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I put my hair in a bun.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: And I remember, so I never had to spend time getting my hair ready, but I did put oil in my hair.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: I realized initially that you couldn't go.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: I went like initially I went to the trading floor with coconut oil in my hair, and it was like, oh, everyone can, everyone was like, oh shit.
31:18
SPEAKER_00: So I thought, okay, I can't do this.
31:19
SPEAKER_00: These people get because in India, if you smell coconut oil, you don't care.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: Everything's yeah, yeah, everything smells.
31:24
SPEAKER_02: Everyone's got it in their hair.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: Everyone's got, you know, there's a lot of smells in India, let's put it that way.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: Because, well, I mean, there's people have flowers in their hair, they have coconut oil, some people have this oil.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what I mean?
31:34
SPEAKER_02: I mean, we don't we don't once in a while you get a mustard oil, yeah, which like which is wild.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: But we used to put oil in our hair and go to school and so on.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: So I went to work, and my dad put oil in his hair and went to work.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: You know, he didn't put a ton, but he put oil in his hair.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: So I was like, okay, I gotta figure this out.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: So I figured out I I didn't have coconut oil, but I did manage to get like, I don't know what oil it would have been, but it didn't have smell.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: And I would put oil in my hair, and to me, it was like lots of people were coming to work with gel.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: So how the fuck did they know I didn't have gel in my hair?
32:08
SPEAKER_00: Just because it was slicked back.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: And then I remember one day I went to dinner with some girlfriends who were all from Bombay.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: Bombay girls are well, I shouldn't say Bombay girls.
32:20
SPEAKER_00: My mother was more strict with me than these girls' mothers.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: They were more anglicized.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: And we all met at this really uh, there's a restaurant called Hakassan.
32:27
SPEAKER_00: We were all in banking, so it was quite a big deal.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: We were all going to Hakasan.
32:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, we had, listen, we had no time, but we had money.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: That's what banking does.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: And we sat down and one of the girls said something, and I said, Yeah, I have to get home, I have to wash my hair.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: And she said, Oh my God, you go to office with oil in your hair.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: And I said, Yeah.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: She said, Oh God, how verni.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: Verni is means vernacular, which means uneducated, like, you know, like the, you know, like the gamar, what's the word?
32:56
SPEAKER_00: Like the villager.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: And I started laughing because all of them were from Bombay and were anglicized.
33:01
SPEAKER_00: And they were like, oh my God, you go to, and it was like, yeah, so does all of India.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: Like what?
33:05
SPEAKER_00: And also I looked at them, I said, You all are gonna be bald by the time, and I was older than all of them.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: And I'm right, I still have the best hair.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: They're all my friends.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: I still have the best hair.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: They basically called you a peasant, though.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, which it is in India, in the city, if you go to hair, if you, you know, for these like for upper middle class people, you don't go to work with oil in your hair.
33:24
SPEAKER_00: But my parents were not that they they were professionals, but they were very clear who they were.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: My father was like, I'm a South Indian Brahmin.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: I wake up, I do my puja, and then I go, you know, and then I have a bat, and then I do my sandhya vandanam.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: And then I grew up like that.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: And again, my parents, because we lived in the Philippines when I was younger, they had parties.
33:44
SPEAKER_00: They had, they drank, they had parties, but my mother wore asari.
33:49
SPEAKER_00: They were wait, pause.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: What is Sandhya Vandanam?
33:52
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that is because I'm not yeah, the thing that South that's that South Indian, you know, they have the punal, the uh thread.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: And so they do Sandyavandam as a little ceremony that all Brahmin boys and men do before they sit to eat and stuff like that.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: Anyone tamilian who's listening to this will know what Sandyavandanam is.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, because you know how India is like all these things happening at the same time.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: Like Punjabis don't know what Tamilans are doing, we don't know what Bengalis are doing, Bengalis don't know what Gujaratis are doing, no one knows what Maharashtans are doing.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: You know how it is.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: Um so, yeah, and so they were very comfortable in their difference and they telegraphed that to us a lot.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: And I think I imbibed it more than my sister did.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: Because she was, you know, it was hard for her.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: She was in a middle school, high school in America, which is in an American high school, which is brutal.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: I went back to India and went to like school with everyone who was like me.
34:43
SPEAKER_00: But American middle school and high school is was, I felt, ex exceptionally hard for kids who are not like everybody else.
34:54
SPEAKER_02: It can be depending on where you are and what your resistance is to listening to what other people have to say.
34:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think the thing is that in the late 70s, early 80s, at an American school in the Philippines, your parents, my parents were, they were not interested in any whining about not having the right shoes.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: They were like, study, be quiet.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: And that was very hard for my sister because that was not, that was that time.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: And that was an American bubble inside the Philippines.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: So it was like a double whammy, right?
35:25
SPEAKER_00: And um, there was no everyone out, we were expats, so there was no support outside.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: And uh, I think it was very hard for her.
35:34
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, um, so yeah, so I mean you were doing it to you at work?
35:41
unknown: No.
35:41
SPEAKER_02: Did anyone say anything to you at work about like, hey, it smells like coconut?
35:46
SPEAKER_00: I think initially they were like, and I was like, Yeah, I have coconut oil in my hair.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: But they didn't, but then I stopped because I was like, I also think it's not nice to be emitting weird smells at work.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: And coconut oil can really smell strong.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: But and I used to bring my coconut oil from India, so I had like the real thing.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: But I was like, okay, I don't want to do that, not for any other reason, but I was just like, that's I wouldn't want someone else to have something on them that the whole time I was sitting next to them because on a trading tour, you're all sitting next to each other.
36:13
SPEAKER_03: Right.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, yeah, I think someone would have said, What do you smell of coconuts?
36:17
SPEAKER_00: They were like, Yeah, I have coconut oil in my hair.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: But I didn't, I don't really care that I had it.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: It's more that I was like, Oh, I gotta fix the oil, so I just fixed it.
36:25
SPEAKER_00: No one ever said, Why is your hair slicked back and shiny?
36:29
SPEAKER_00: People put gel in their hair all the time in the West.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:32
unknown: Yeah.
36:33
SPEAKER_02: So I didn't worry about.
36:35
SPEAKER_02: How do you think about your hair now as a tool in performance, if at all?
36:39
SPEAKER_00: Oh no, I think so.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: A trading floor is not in, is not even remotely as geared towards appearance as what I do now.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what I mean?
36:52
SPEAKER_00: Trading floors, no one is really looking at a woman saying, Are you are you pretty?
36:56
SPEAKER_00: They might think you're pretty or not, but that's not what's getting you, you know.
37:00
SPEAKER_00: Whereas in performance, I mean, there's all kinds, I mean, what is the age?
37:05
SPEAKER_00: And if you're this age, you're not getting this role, and how do you look and what the makeup and la la la.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: It's a lot.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
37:12
SPEAKER_00: And so uh now I do think about my hair uh more in the sense of how is it looking on the day if I have to be in.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: So I'll tell you a few things.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: When I'm on a film set or a TV show set, they're brutal on your hair, and it drives me crazy.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: Because I'm like, you're ruining my hair.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: Like you're harming it with all the heat.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: And so I am pretty like, I'll put oil in my hair, I'll wash it, I'll wake up at three to get my hair, to nourish my hair before it goes into a week of like, you know, and I noticed a lot of the actresses and stuff I've worked with, they have short hair, and they can't afford to have this kind of hair regime because they're always on a set.
37:55
SPEAKER_00: And sets don't function on you having beautiful hair, they function on getting the shots done, right?
38:02
SPEAKER_00: So it's not a nice regime for hair.
38:04
SPEAKER_00: That's one thing I've noticed.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, I think how you want to appear on stage, I like to be very comfortable.
38:11
SPEAKER_00: So I won't have a complex blow dry.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: I'll just have a blow dry and go on stage.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: Um I think for my first special, I like to have my hair back.
38:22
SPEAKER_00: For the first special, I had a very severe bun.
38:25
SPEAKER_00: Um, which in retrospect, I was like, that's too severe.
38:28
SPEAKER_00: And then for alphabet, I had my hair back, but I had it down because I was gonna talk about hair.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: And then for the swanky, the tour I'm on now, the poster, I had a very clear idea of how I wanted to look.
38:42
SPEAKER_00: And it was a bit of a homage to how my mother, what my mother and my father thought was swanky.
38:48
SPEAKER_00: And it was a lot of like the Maria Callas, Jackie O vibes.
38:52
SPEAKER_00: And so I have the hair that I have, and it's fully my own hair, back brushed to within an inch of its life, but it's like six inches off my head.
39:01
SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah, hair very iconic look, yeah.
39:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think for me, I think hair communicates, it it telegraphs something.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: You know, my hair, depending on what I've done with it, if I choose to, it will communicate something about or it will contribute to what I'm trying to communicate.
39:27
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
39:29
SPEAKER_02: But that's I mean, that's part of why I made the show.
39:32
SPEAKER_02: I feel hair is so much more than just hair, and sometimes it gets relegated to that or just discussions of routine, and it says so much more about us.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you know, I'll tell you something.
39:43
SPEAKER_00: I remember so I used to have long hair and I used to wash it and I would go to sleep.
39:48
SPEAKER_00: So it would be like yours, but much more wild because I would go to sleep and I'd wake up and it was very wavy.
39:55
SPEAKER_00: And I remember I had this boyfriend, and I won't take names.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: I had a boyfriend, and he was staying over in my room and I'd washed my hair and he slept over, and I woke up in the morning and he turned to me, and I guess he'd never stayed over or something.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: He looked at me and he's like, Oh my god, your hair is so wild.
40:12
SPEAKER_00: And the way he said it wasn't like it's disgusting, but it was kind of like, oh, this is very unruly.
40:20
SPEAKER_00: And I remember thinking, clearly thinking, Oh, this person doesn't understand me.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: But I think he probably did you dump him after that?
40:31
SPEAKER_00: Did I what?
40:33
SPEAKER_00: Did you dump him after that?
40:35
SPEAKER_00: I didn't dump him right away.
40:36
SPEAKER_00: I did dump him eventually because it became clear that that statement was part of a very larger mindset about how much wildness disturbed him.
40:49
SPEAKER_00: Um and also what he counted as wildness.
40:54
SPEAKER_00: But I remember when he said that, I looked at him and I thought I would I would give someone a compliment and say, Oh, that hair looks wild.
41:07
SPEAKER_00: Like say Tina Turner had curly Indian hair, but like that same size of hair.
41:14
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
41:14
SPEAKER_00: Because her hair was kind of like a shag, wasn't it?
41:17
SPEAKER_00: And the way he said it, I thought he looked alarmed.
41:20
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, oh.
41:23
SPEAKER_00: And I clocked it away.
41:25
SPEAKER_00: Because also I, you know, hadn't grown up with European or Caucasian white boys, so they had no idea.
41:32
SPEAKER_00: They hadn't grown up with girls from India, you know.
41:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, so I do remember that.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: And I remember thinking, oh.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: And um then I realized when I started getting my hair blow dried that it straightens out.
41:43
SPEAKER_00: I don't do that on purpose, it straightens out, but I don't like that.
41:48
SPEAKER_00: So I tell them when they blow dry my hair to kind of leave some curl in.
41:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so we try.
41:54
SPEAKER_00: Also, after you have kids, your hair changes a lot.
41:57
SPEAKER_00: My hair became more straight.
42:00
SPEAKER_02: When you were describing how your hair was back when you were younger, though, I was thinking it sounds like that kind of 90s Bollywood actress hair that was like big and beautiful and long and somewhere between curly and wavy, and just wherever in the wind in one of those movies shot in Switzerland because they were all shot in Switzerland in front of Lake.
42:20
SPEAKER_00: Here, let me show you a picture of my hair.
42:23
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I'm 19 in this.
42:26
SPEAKER_02: You brought photos.
42:27
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, no, I didn't bring them.
42:28
SPEAKER_00: They're lying here at my in my house.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: I just had taken some out, believe it or not.
42:33
SPEAKER_00: That's gorgeous.
42:34
SPEAKER_02: And that absolutely beautiful.
42:38
SPEAKER_02: And this looks like what I was imagining.
42:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
42:40
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, no, it's probably just long, beautiful hair.
42:43
SPEAKER_00: I had to wear a sari for this thing.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, and I mean, it's so funny because I I had to fix some photos, and you can see here, I have all these photos of my long hair.
42:54
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I can show you so many, but I think okay, so this is after I cut my hair.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: This is 1997.
43:01
SPEAKER_00: I'll cover the other person.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: That's me after I'd cut my hair talking to my mom.
43:05
SPEAKER_00: That was the shortest my hair had ever been.
43:08
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
43:08
SPEAKER_00: And that's my mom telling me something.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then oh my god.
43:15
SPEAKER_00: And the thing is, with with the hair thing was that you never left it open.
43:19
SPEAKER_00: It was called leaving your hair open.
43:21
SPEAKER_00: My mother would say, Don't leave your hair open.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: That was not allowed.
43:25
SPEAKER_00: You had to have it in a braid because you were, it was not presentable to leave your hair open.
43:33
SPEAKER_00: So I didn't really have an experience of that.
43:36
SPEAKER_02: I had a whole sort of reframing in my mind, too, of what it means to have your hair open.
43:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
43:46
SPEAKER_02: And she is not the one with curly hair.
43:48
SPEAKER_02: My dad had curly hair, so that meant she knew nothing about what to do with curly hair because my dad just he washed his hair with bar soap.
43:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
43:54
SPEAKER_02: I asked him once recently what he used to do.
43:56
SPEAKER_02: And he was like, I'd wash, I'd use soap, just use soap in my hair.
44:00
SPEAKER_02: And he'd throw on some coconut oil or almond oil.
44:03
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
44:03
SPEAKER_02: Um my family is Punjabi.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, of course.
44:07
SPEAKER_00: That's the yeah, that's what, yeah.
44:09
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, and then So and my mom would just throw a bunch of oil in my hair and braid it.
44:15
SPEAKER_02: And this idea of your hair being open, it just I just didn't really have my hair open for a long time.
44:23
SPEAKER_02: And then as I got older and, you know, I got into middle school, yeah, et cetera, I noticed a lot of girls actually they do their hair is open.
44:30
SPEAKER_02: The hair is like a thing you do every day.
44:32
SPEAKER_02: It's not just like a special, it doesn't have to just be uh, you know, special occasion that your hair is open and set into some style.
44:40
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
44:40
SPEAKER_02: And I don't know where this idea comes from in Indian culture about your hair has to be like put away in some way.
44:47
SPEAKER_00: I you know what?
44:48
SPEAKER_00: I have to be honest, I don't know if it's that your hair has to be put away.
44:51
SPEAKER_00: It might be, but I think the thing is we have I think we have so much of it.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and also I don't think we there was like my grandmother, etc., they Indian hairstyles were very beautiful.
45:08
SPEAKER_00: If you look at Ajanta, Elora, all those caves, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, they talk about beautiful hair.
45:15
SPEAKER_00: There was when a woman was truly like in her own private private space, when her clothes were off, when all that then her hair was out.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: And you wore clothes, you were presentable, and you gathered up your hair.
45:32
SPEAKER_00: There were very elaborate hair.
45:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, my mother's grandmother was Rajasthani, she had a thousand braids.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: Thousand braids.
45:39
SPEAKER_00: And Rajasthan, they do little what I suppose it's like cornrose, but it's not because our hair is different.
45:45
SPEAKER_00: But they all braid their hair in tiny braids.
45:48
SPEAKER_00: My mother's grandmother, yeah, she used to do that all in tiny braids, and then they braid it back into one big braid.
45:55
SPEAKER_00: So there's beautiful.
45:56
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a lot of collecting hair because you can't do housework, you can't raise kids, you know, with all this hair flying around.
46:04
SPEAKER_00: So it's just not done.
46:06
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, I think hair, there's an entire, there's a lot of old uh things you'll find written about the beautification of hair.
46:18
SPEAKER_00: You know, they would take perfumed, like in the olden days, like in the days of Raja Maharajas, when queens had very long hair, they would take perfumed smoke and put it under your hair to get it to smell nice before they braided it away.
46:32
SPEAKER_00: And you had loose braids.
46:34
SPEAKER_00: So it I think it was more, it was a culture of how hair was adorned.
46:39
SPEAKER_00: There was so much jewelry that went in hair.
46:41
SPEAKER_00: You can't have that in open hair.
46:44
SPEAKER_00: That's true.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: You can't tuck it away.
46:46
SPEAKER_00: No, and I think also with open hair, you need to have a lot of you know, open hair and bringing uh the tools and technology of heat and blow dryers sort of goes together.
47:02
SPEAKER_00: Because even in the West, when you didn't have those things, women were braiding their hair or bunning their hair up because the hair gets in the way.
47:09
SPEAKER_00: You know, when I when I cook, I put my hair up.
47:11
SPEAKER_00: I never cook like this.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: I just would never in a million years, because I'm like, what if the hair falls?
47:17
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's what are you doing in the way?
47:20
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
47:20
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes when I really need to focus, I will put on a cap, and I'm like, if I can't focus at all, this is very rare occasions that I'll put on a cap and I'm like, this is my thinking cap now.
47:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
47:29
SPEAKER_02: I have to focus on this task.
47:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
47:31
SPEAKER_00: When my kids see me doing this, they're like, uh oh.
47:34
SPEAKER_00: Because I'm getting serious.
47:35
SPEAKER_00: I don't have time for hair to be fat.
47:37
SPEAKER_00: They're in trouble.
47:38
SPEAKER_02: Well, or I'm getting down to business, I want to go check on their rooms, or you know, they're like, uh, their curly hair icon is.
47:50
SPEAKER_02: So if you have a curly one, um, or one that matches your hair type.
47:57
SPEAKER_00: Good question.
48:00
SPEAKER_00: Curly hair icon.
48:03
SPEAKER_00: I don't know that I have a hair icon.
48:07
SPEAKER_00: I think I probably had different hair icons at different points in my life.
48:16
SPEAKER_00: I've never had to have a hair icon.
48:18
SPEAKER_00: My hair is my own eye.
48:19
SPEAKER_00: It's like it's there's no one I'm like, oh, I wish I had that hair.
48:24
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what I mean?
48:24
SPEAKER_00: Is that lame?
48:25
SPEAKER_00: I've just never.
48:26
SPEAKER_02: No, I love that.
48:27
SPEAKER_02: That's beautiful, and I hope everyone listening knows that they can feel that comfortable in themselves too.
48:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and also when I was very young, I had a boycott and I was the only girl.
48:40
SPEAKER_00: There were these twins, there was big blue eyes and blonde hair, and one was called Mandy, and one was called something with C.
48:48
SPEAKER_00: We were six, five, and six, and they had ribbons in their hair.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: And I had a boycott, and I had clothes two sizes too big, and I had a stammer, and I was the only brown kid in the class.
49:01
SPEAKER_00: And I I remember looking at them and thinking, oh, they have beautiful hair, but it's golden.
49:09
SPEAKER_00: And that didn't make me want to have golden hair.
49:11
SPEAKER_00: I was like, I guess I won't have that hair.
49:15
SPEAKER_00: You know, like, oh well, I won't have that hair.
49:18
SPEAKER_00: So I never had, I never wanted their hair.
49:20
SPEAKER_00: I was, I mean, I guess I was logical.
49:22
SPEAKER_00: I was like, I cannot have this hair.
49:25
SPEAKER_00: So I guess I'm not having that.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: Of course, my hair then did grow and I did have a braid, and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
49:30
SPEAKER_00: But um, yeah, yeah.
49:32
SPEAKER_00: I never, I'm, I don't know, it's lame, but I've never had like people talk about Julia Roberts' hair and pretty woman.
49:39
SPEAKER_00: I think it's nice, but I'm like, I I that's not my hair.
49:43
SPEAKER_00: I think my hair is my own icon.
49:47
SPEAKER_02: I love that so much.
49:49
SPEAKER_02: I love it so much.
49:50
SPEAKER_02: What are you spiraling about right now?
49:52
SPEAKER_00: Bruh.
49:53
SPEAKER_00: Are you kidding?
49:55
SPEAKER_00: Everything.
49:56
SPEAKER_00: I've got three kids.
49:56
SPEAKER_00: What what are you?
49:58
SPEAKER_00: I've got teenagers.
49:58
SPEAKER_00: Like, what do you it's like, who's do I where are you?
50:03
SPEAKER_00: Where have you gone?
50:04
SPEAKER_00: Are you doing ketamine?
50:05
SPEAKER_00: What's happening?
50:06
SPEAKER_00: Like, these are teenagers.
50:07
SPEAKER_00: They're not, they're smart and they don't listen.
50:09
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, man, if you're smoking, I hope it's cigarettes don't vape.
50:14
SPEAKER_00: Because we don't know what vapes do.
50:16
SPEAKER_00: Cigarettes, we know.
50:16
SPEAKER_00: It's not good.
50:17
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not, by the way, no, no one should smoke.
50:20
SPEAKER_00: No one should vape.
50:21
SPEAKER_00: But you're telling me what I'm spiraling about?
50:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm spiraling about the fact that your children get to an age where they are going off to university or they're just pre-university, and you're like, I know, I have no idea what this kid is doing.
50:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's pretty scary.
50:35
SPEAKER_00: And that I you know it doesn't make me spiral, but it makes it does.
50:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, like, there's days when if I can't get a hold of them, I'm like, well, that's that's it.
50:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I slightly am that that that's that really.
50:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, otherwise, um yeah.
50:51
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are many things in the world happening that are terrible, but I've always felt like I can pray about them like do poojah, or I can, but I can't.
51:02
SPEAKER_00: If I start spiraling about that, what by the time I get to my life, I I will leave my body.
51:08
SPEAKER_02: There's no bandwidth left, yeah.
51:09
SPEAKER_00: I will leave my body.
51:11
SPEAKER_02: So what do you want to spiral less about?
51:16
SPEAKER_00: Good question.
51:18
SPEAKER_00: I want to spiral less about how hard it is for me to get my body to do what it wants, what I want at this age, which is sort of the menopause, perimenopausy age.
51:31
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't listen to me.
51:33
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I am not eating ice cream.
51:35
SPEAKER_00: Get rid of some of this.
51:36
SPEAKER_00: It's like, nope.
51:38
SPEAKER_00: It's the first time in my life.
51:40
SPEAKER_00: And I I don't think it's a big deal.
51:41
SPEAKER_00: It shouldn't be.
51:42
SPEAKER_00: It's natural, but it bothers me because I've always had a relationship with my body where it did what I wanted, and now it doesn't.
51:48
SPEAKER_00: And it there are times I'm like, ugh.
51:52
SPEAKER_00: It's at some level very it's too basic a thing to spiral about.
51:57
SPEAKER_00: But I do.
51:58
SPEAKER_00: So I wish I didn't.
52:01
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that's very relatable.
52:02
SPEAKER_02: I think no matter what age someone is, they're always going to be wanting something out of their body that it's not doing.
52:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I'm just I'm like, come on, man, I should be able to drop this.
52:14
unknown: Yeah.
52:15
SPEAKER_02: What do you want to?
52:16
SPEAKER_02: This is a question I add in sometimes.
52:18
SPEAKER_02: What do you want to spiral upward about?
52:20
SPEAKER_02: Because I feel like spirals are always negative, but why don't we have positive spirals in this life?
52:26
SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
52:26
SPEAKER_00: Like, what do I want to what does spiraling up mean?
52:30
SPEAKER_02: What do you want to sort of become mentally obsessed with?
52:33
SPEAKER_02: That's like a positive.
52:34
SPEAKER_00: Oh, exercise.
52:35
SPEAKER_00: Like or go upward on.
52:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
52:37
SPEAKER_00: Exercise.
52:37
SPEAKER_00: Exercise.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: Lifting weights three times a week.
52:40
SPEAKER_00: Just 25 minutes three times a week.
52:43
SPEAKER_00: Just do it, Sindhu.
52:44
SPEAKER_00: Spiral up, spiral out through the roof into the sky about this.
52:47
SPEAKER_00: It's so basic.
52:48
SPEAKER_00: So many women are doing it.
52:50
SPEAKER_00: I go for a walk every day and I'm like weights.
52:52
SPEAKER_00: My I've played sport my whole life and now I don't.
52:54
SPEAKER_00: And so everything else seems like, ugh.
52:56
SPEAKER_00: I want to spiral, shoot, rocket spiral about three times a week doing weights for 25 minutes.
53:03
SPEAKER_00: It's not that hard.
53:04
SPEAKER_00: But I You will become addicted at some point.
53:06
SPEAKER_00: I promise.
53:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm done.
53:08
SPEAKER_00: And I'm addicted to so many things.
53:10
SPEAKER_00: It's like it's the first time in my life I've been nicotine-free for like a month.
53:16
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it and I hate it.
53:18
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
53:19
SPEAKER_00: I hate it, but I have to.
53:21
SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, I know addiction.
53:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm just waiting to get.
53:25
SPEAKER_00: I love the fact that as an addict, you could become addicted to good things.
53:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm waiting for that to happen to me.
53:33
SPEAKER_02: You you will become addicted to weightlifting after a certain inflection.
53:37
SPEAKER_02: And I think I could I've been lifting for 10 years and I'm I'm very, very addicted to it.
53:41
SPEAKER_00: What did you start when you were 12?
53:44
SPEAKER_02: No, I I'm in my mid-30s.
53:46
SPEAKER_02: You look sweet.
53:47
SPEAKER_02: I started in my thank you.
53:48
SPEAKER_02: I well, actually, you know what?
53:50
SPEAKER_02: I think everyone should be happy with whatever age they look.
53:53
SPEAKER_02: No, I know they are.
53:54
SPEAKER_00: I know, I know, but I'm saying you look young as in you have longer time to start looking old.
54:00
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what I mean?
54:01
SPEAKER_00: And the thing about looking old is it's fine, but again, your body stops.
54:05
SPEAKER_00: Your body at some point's like, bitch, I'm gonna do what I want.
54:09
SPEAKER_00: You can keep all your mental coo, poo, poo, poo, coo, poo, and I'm doing what I want.
54:12
SPEAKER_00: And I think at that point you're like, oh, come on, you have to befriend your body in a different way.
54:17
SPEAKER_02: I am grateful if you're saying I have a longer time horizon before my body starts rejecting what I want to be doing with myself and my life.
54:24
SPEAKER_02: 100%.
54:25
SPEAKER_02: I'm cool with that.
54:26
SPEAKER_02: I will keep health for as long as possible.
54:28
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I started lifting weights after um a kind of major surgery, and I wanted to just re-strengthen and you know, it's become a consistent part of my life and something that makes me mentally feel a lot stronger as well.
54:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you spiraled right up into that.
54:45
SPEAKER_02: Spiraled right up into that.
54:46
SPEAKER_02: That was a great callback.
54:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, Sindhu, can I ask you why did you say yes when I DM'd you?
54:51
SPEAKER_02: I'm just curious because you know, my show is a really small show, and I'm just getting started, and I'm always curious what inspired someone to actually carve out time.
55:00
SPEAKER_00: I thought it was so interesting.
55:02
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I our hair, like I said, our hair has been such a central part of my conception of myself, of beauty, of Indian versus not Indian women, of what it means to be alive in a female body.
55:17
SPEAKER_00: I was like, that's so interesting.
55:18
SPEAKER_00: Let's do it.
55:20
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for making time.
55:21
SPEAKER_02: This has been so fun.
55:22
SPEAKER_02: No, no, it's my pleasure.
55:24
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for asking me.
55:26
SPEAKER_02: I'd love to hear what you want to spiral a bird about.
55:29
SPEAKER_02: Email me at voice note at Priya at WeARSpiraling.com.
55:33
SPEAKER_02: This interview was longer than our usual episodes, so if you're still here, thank you for listening.
55:38
SPEAKER_02: Please follow or subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on, whether it's Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or something else.
55:43
SPEAKER_02: It really helps us get discovered by more people.
55:46
SPEAKER_02: And rate the show five stars.
55:48
SPEAKER_02: This podcast is hosted by Myura and engineered by Citizens of Sound.
55:52
SPEAKER_02: Extremely catchy theme music by the incomparable Lop Gun.
55:56
SPEAKER_02: That's L A P G A N.
55:58
SPEAKER_02: So many of you ask me where to find this song because it got stuck in your head.
56:01
SPEAKER_02: So he's on Spotify and all the major streaming platforms.
56:05
SPEAKER_02: See you next time.