Barber Michelangelo

Mukul is in India. A few days ago he was here in Bangalore too. The following text in italics was written by him a few years ago during his engineering days.


The reason Michelangelo was deemed a genius was not only due to
the fact that he was a great sculptor and painter but also because he
had a thorough understanding of the human psyche. This skill is relevant
for engineering students even today.
In 1504 when Michelangelo was working on this masterpiece in
marble- The statue of David – he worked in complete secrecy, not
allowing anyone to see the statue. However just before he finished the
statue one Roman V.I.P. managed to get permission to see the statue. The
statue was indeed magnificent, but he thought he should make some
comment. So he told Michelangelo, ”The nose is too thick”. Michelangelo
said nothing. He climbed upto the nose of the 4-metre statue. Concealed
in his hand was some marble dust and as he pretended to chisel away he
let the dust drop slowly. When he climbed down, David’s nose was
unchanged but the V.I.P. looked approvingly and said, “It’s fine now.”
Cut to the 21st century. As I queued up to the teacher for her
signature on my file for submission, everything was in order but then
freeing a student form this term-work burden on his first try was
against her principles. So she looked keenly for a mistake and finally
said, “The lines in the flowchart are all crooked. Straighten them.” I
went back to a nearby table and pretended to work on the journal with my
pencil and eraser. When I went back to her, the flowchart was as it was
but this time she nodded and accepted the file saying, “It’s okay now”.
I walked away thinking, Michelangelo would have made a great engineer.

Now that day I had been to the barber. As always, I had asked him to cut my hair as short as possible. When he thought that he had cut my hair as short as possible, he asked me whether I was satisified. I asked him to trim it further. The barber told me that any further trimming would not suit me but I refused to budge. The barber then started to making louder noises with his scissors, but then he was not cutting any hair at all...well almost. After a minute or two he asked me if I was satisified. I nodded my head. I walked away thinking, Michelangelo would have made a great barber too.