Men go about their business in the crowded dusty streets, their faces covered by bushy black beards that would make Captain Haddock proud/XINHUA-File
A handsome but follically-challenged young man, he decided the time was ripe to restore his honour, battered by years of taunts that follow the barren-headed and the beardless in Pakistan.
In the northwestern city of Peshawar, home to underground Taliban hideouts and a gateway for trade to Afghanistan, men go about their business in the crowded dusty streets, their faces covered by bushy black beards that would make Captain Haddock proud.
The city’s roads are filled with giant billboards of celebrities once bald but now all smiles. They extol the virtues of manhood restored surgically with a few well-placed tufts of hair.
“When I saw my cousin return from his procedure, I was in shock. I said to myself: I have to have it too,” said the thirtysomething excitedly as he prepared to have the procedure at a local hair transplant clinic.
“Hair is like our weapon against society.”
In Pakistan, hair is synonymous with virility to the point that even some Taliban fighters buy ointments to give their long locks and beards a lustrous finish.
Woe to those without: they are labelled “ganjas”, a deeply derogatory term.
“Here, calling someone a ‘ganja’ is a stigma but over there (in the West), saying ‘bald’ is not that bad,” explained Dr Humayun Mohmand, one of the first doctors to offer the treatment in Pakistan.
