& çâÌæÚUæð´ ·¤è ¥ôÚU Îð¹Ùæ ÁæÚUè ÚU¹ð´ ¥ÍæüÌ ¥ÂÙð ÜÿØ ÂÚU ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´Ð ãæÚU Ù ×æÙð´, €UØô´ç·¤ ·¤æ× ·¤ÚUÙð âð ¥æÂ·¤ô ©gðàØ ·¤è Âýæç# ãôÌè ãñ ¥õÚU ÁèßÙ ·¤æ ¹æÜèÂÙ ÎêÚU ãôÌæ ãñÐ ÖÜð ãè ÁèßÙ ×ð´ ç·¤ÌÙè Öè ·¤çÆÙæ§ü €UØô´ Ù ¥æ°, çÁ™ææâæ ¥õÚU ©ˆâæã ÕÙæ° ÚU¹ð´Ð ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´, ÜÿØ ã×ðàææ ¥æÂ·Ô¤ Âæâ ãôÌð ãñ´ çÁ‹ãð´ ÂæÙð ·Ô¤ çÜ° ÂýØæâ ¥æÂ ·¤Öè Öè àæéM¤ ·¤ÚU â·¤Ìð ãñ´Ð

Give your baby a pointy head
I get the weirdest jobs. I was asked to go comfort a man who was going bald.
"For some reason, he's really upset," our mutual friend told me. "Go show him that having a head like bowling ball can be a positive thing. It gives the rest of us a good laugh." (So sensitive, my friends.)
I, obediently, turned up at the address given to find a young man with a huge head of hair. Closer examination showed that he had used some sort of miniature garden fork to fluff up his thin, disappearing locks. He looked like
he had a small personal raincloud round his head.
"You don't have to worry," I lied. "Women love baldies and they fall at my feet on a daily basis."
He looked me up and down and gave me a "Yeah Right" look. He refused to be comforted and eventually revealed why he was so upset. "I have a terrible secret," he said. "My head is a really weird shape."
I examined it carefully. He was right. It stuck out at the back. "I see what you mean. Without your hair you'd look like something from Alien Versus Predator. But that's not so bad. Aliens are cool in their own way," I told him.
"Not to girls." he responded. I had to admit he had a point there. He blamed his mother for the problem.
A large number of parents in China and in south Asia spend hours every week shaping their babies' heads to make them perfectly globu-
lar. Some use molds. (Power tools are not recommended.) "My mother obviously skipped this," he lamented bitterly.
I decided to trawl for information from the smartest network of people on the planet: readers. Jason Sydun said you can change your head shape, but only if you are an infant: "With the right manipulation, you can shape the top of the baby's head, make it rounder or pointier."
A doctor who did not want her name mentioned said babies who always sleep on the same part of their heads get a flat section. 1 imagine this can be useful in later life for balancing trays or leaning against walls.
Ancient writer Hippocrates said the fashion 2,400 years ago was to lengthen the heads of boys and flatten those of girls. It struck me that this would be a good tradition to revive in Singapore, where brainy-lookingwomen scare off men.
Not only heads are reshaped. In mainland China, parents press their
babies' noses to make them flat, while in the Indian subcontinent,
they do the opposite. Reader Farah Huq from Bangladesh said: "When I was young, my mom used to pull on my nose religiously every day, so that it would become sharp and defined like my Dad's." But her nose turned out rounded and cute like her mother's.
Reader Christy Chiang asked: "Is it technically possible to shape a baby's head into a square by wrapping it in a square mold? Is that what happened to SpongeBob Squarepants?" Luckily, Christy doesn't have any children to experiment on, but 1 shall keep her email to warn any prospective husbands about her interest in producing children with cuboid heads. Or I may introduce her to my balding friend. If you can't have block-headed kids, Christy, how would you fancy a cute brood of aliens?
Visit our columnist at: www.vittachi.com