July 19, 2002	Friday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 8, 1423

NEW DELHI, July 18: President-elect Avul Pakir Jainalabedin Abdul Kalam not only received votes from the ballot boxes during the presidential election on Thursday but advice as well — on his long, unkempt hair.

“Cut your hair” was the brief messages scrawled on a ballot by one of the deputies who voted for the father of India’s missile programme.

Another message to Kalam’s 87-year-old Communist rival Lakshmi Sahgal suggested that she should have contested the presidential election a decade earlier.

The president-elect’s hair is one of the main points of speculation in the Indian press, “Will he or won’t he cut his hair?”

Unkempt hair and crumpled clothes have long been the trademarks of India’s most famous technocrat.

The presidential staff is worried about his clothes and appearance, press reports said. Kalam reportedly told them that he cut his hair once in four months but refused to say when the next haircut was due, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.

Press reports also hinted that he goes to a top level hair stylist to maintain an unkempt look.

Kalam has reportedly told the presidential staff that the weather was too hot to wear a formal closed collar suit at the swearing-in ceremony. What he will don is open to speculation.—dpa