India, Dec. 3 -- My knee-length, straight, black mane has often been an ice-breaker. Right from young girls in the park to auto drivers, washroom attendants, subzi-mandi visitors, fashionable mall-strollers to fellow conference attendees, it has evoked curiosity in all of them. Perfect strangers feel no inhibition in approaching me directly and ask, "Which shampoo do you use? How do you maintain your hair? What do you apply for this jet black colour? How do you condition your hair?" I've been amused by their innocent assumption of the right to barge in, hold me back and quiz me about my hair and by their expectation that I would be more than welcoming to share my secret with them and respond smilingly. In earlier days, I used to be at a loss for words to their enthusiastic queries as there was nothing special that I could tell them. My hair as well as my mother's and sisters' is long and thick, without special effort, genetics, you can say. When I tried to tell this to my curious admirers, the look of disappointment on their face was too much to bear. They demanded to hear beauty secrets and thought I was intentionally not divulging it to them. So, I changed my strategy and turned mischievous. I would just give them a curt look and ask, "Are you a vegetarian?" If they said yes, they were told to turn non-vegetarian, and if they said no, then it was the contrary. This was done in a sorry tone as if they could never change their food preferences and hence should not aspire for long hair. But their hurt and surprised expressions eventually made me reconsider my policy. Their intrusion into my privacy should be taken kindly, I thought, after all it was only a harmless query. Now I take a few minutes off from whatever urgent work I'm doing and with an agony aunt smile, I ask them about their diet and nutrition habits and then tell them that good health induces good hair. I explain to them ways of taking care of hair that I have picked up from different magazines. This makes them content and they allow me to get back to work. This routine has been repeated so many times that now whenever a stranger approaches me with a request, "Excuse me, can I ask you something?" One of my children start rattling off the healthy hair advice without giving a chance to the other person to even spell out the question. The look of amazement in the eyes of the inquisitive stranger is ample reward. However, my husband later added a post-script to my usual answer. He would warn the questioner of the hazards of long hair and tell them with glee the incident when my long plait got entangled in the axle of the rickshaw I was riding and how he had saved my life that day! Long hair is not without risk, after all....