Photo: CISF Twitter (left) and Pixabay (right)
Remember Jayesh Patel, the 32-year-old who impersonated an 81-year-old to go to the US but instead, was arrested at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport? In his statement, Patel had revealed that he took the help of an agent and a makeup artist. While the agent was identified as a man named Bharat who arranged for a fake passport for a price of about Rs 30 lakh, police have finally caught up with the other accomplice, the makeup artist, who goes by the name of ‘Billu Barber’.Some of us may be more familiar with Billu Barber, the film, but if you look beyond the rustic poverty porn and glib celebrity culture that it embodies, you’ll see it’s really a film that talks about the perils of pretending to be something you’re not. So it’s only fitting that Shamsher Singh, a barber from Delhi’s Rohini area, adopted this moniker for his side hustle: changing people’s appearance for a price. At his shop in Patel Nagar, police found cosmetic material used to dye people's hair grey.Singh is not only responsible for Patel almost pull off his great escape, but he also confessed to having given such glow-ups to more than ten people, charging them about Rs 20,000 each, according to the Delhi Airport Deputy Commissioner of Police, Sanjay Bhatia. He might’ve even gotten away with it, had our man Patel not gone and got himself caught by avoiding eye contact with authorities, who consequently realised his skin looked younger and his hair roots were black.Follow Shamani Joshi on Instagram.