She was just about 40 years old when she suddenly started losing her hair in patches. In the next six months they were all gone. She was diagnosed with alopecia, a medical condition in which the hair falls out in round patches. Neither she, nor her family, was ready for this. But after pep talks and fruitless treatments, she embraced her baldness. Not only did she embrace it, she went on to participate in the Mrs India Worldwide competition last year and ended up as a top 10 finalist.
Meet Ketaki Jani, 46, who fought against all odds to face the big bad body-shaming world and prove that bald, can be beautiful too.
“I was surfing Facebook when I came across the competition’s notification and I clicked it. The entry form asked for my hair colour. I decided to have fun and mentioned ‘no hair’ as my response,” tells Ketaki with a hearty laugh. She controls her laughter to add, “I was just not expecting anything from it, except the momentary thrill it gave me. But with an hour of submitting my form, I got a response and they wanted me to participate. I went on to compete against 50-odd participants and ended up as the top 10 finalist. It was a great experience.”
Ask her how she managed to bridge the gap between being bald and being accepted as beautiful, and after a deep breath she says, “I owe it all to my daughter. She brought me out of depression that lasted for two years during which I took some treatments, which failed. I was hopeless. I used to hide my reality under a cap or a scarf. But one fine day my daughter told me: Mom, you are bald and you are beautiful. You have to accept this fact. Let people accept your beauty. You don’t need to accept their perception of beauty. You be happy about it.”
That session with her 20-something daughter eventually became the turning point of her life.
“People used to actually come up to me and ask if I have cancer. They would sympathise and look at me as if I am some alien. But after the motivation from my family, especially my husband and daughter, I stopped wearing those scarves and caps,” she says confidently.
Once she accepted her baldness, she accepted it absolutely. She went ahead to get her head tattooed. “I always wanted to get a tattoo but never got it done for some or the other reason. One day I realised I have a wonderful canvas for a tattoo and now it is for all to see,” she says.
Ketaki, a special officer for Gujarati in the Maharashtra state bureau of text book production, is based in Pune. After her first success, she got all the support from her family to participate in other competitions like Mrs Pune and Ms and Mrs Pune International, where she got the title of Mrs Popular.
Then, in May 2017, she participated in ‘Mrs India: She is India’, which was a beauty pageant for married women. She went on to receive the Mrs People’s Choice Award apart from making it to the top 10 here as well.
“I participated in this competition to tell the world that alopecia is also a trigger for domestic violence. I know many such women who have been subjected to mental torture at the behest of their immediate family and society. A young girl in Khandwa recently committed suicide when she couldn’t handle the alopecia-induced depression. In way she didn’t kill herself. The society killed her,” tells Ketaki.
Ask her if she ever thought of getting some treatment again and she says, “Never. I in fact threw an open challenge on Facebook to all those hair clinics to come forward and get my hair back.”
Ketaki then asks some very harsh questions. “A woman suffering from alopecia had to migrate to Australia from India. Why do we need to ridicule someone suffering from an auto-immune disease?”
“We need to accept alopecians as part of the society and stop giving them those nasty glares and uttering those obnoxious words like takla and ganja,” she says. And she has a message for alopecians, too. “You also need to face it. Unless you aren’t comfortable with yourself, how can you expect the world to be comfortable with you?”
