Pakistanis hope to get ahead with hair transplants

Mohammad Shahid's eyes lit up when he saw his once bald cousin come home one day with a head full of hair and a strutting gait to match.

A handsome but follicly-challenged young man, he decided the time was ripe to restore his honour, battered by years of taunts that follow the barren-headed and the beardless in Pakistan. He was getting a hair transplant.

In the northwestern city of Peshawar, home to underground Taliban hideouts and a gateway for trade to Afghanistan, the city's roads are lined with giant billboards of celebrities, once bald but now all smiles. They extol the virtues of manhood restored surgically with a few tufts of hair.

"When I saw my cousin return from his procedure, I was in shock. I said to myself 'I have to have it too'," said the thirtysomething excitedly as he prepared to have the procedure at a local hair transplant clinic. "Hair is like our weapon against society."

In Pakistan, hair is synonymous with virility to the point that even some Taliban fighters buy ointments to give their long locks and beards a lustrous finish.

Woe to the hairless: they are labelled ganjas, a deeply derogatory term.