One of Lahore’s leading stylists, Natasha Saigol is a household name when it comes to cuts and colours. With almost a decade of experience in hair styling belying her age, Natasha is young, bubbly and energetic and, at the same time, a thorough professional with an aura of confidence around her which tells you she knows exactly what she’s talking about! Natasha has a busy schedule and when she’s not flying to Karachi, Thailand and Dubai or taking advanced flying lessons, she indulges in whatever is on the bestseller’s list, as she says that those make for good reading more often than not. She says she also likes reading short stories and recently started reading biographies. The first biography she read was Daughter of the East and found it to be remarkable, and goes on to say, “I also picked up a work of fiction based on fact, which was A Case of Exploding Mangoes. It’s a great book, its witty, its funny and the only thing is you don’t know how much of it is true and you want to believe that all of it is true. It shows Zia in a whole other way; not like a ruthless military dictator, but someone who was a dictator and quite cowardly in his ways. He used to hide behind his chief of army staff and his first rank of generals just because he was scared and he didn’t want to make all these decisions, and when he had to make a decision, he used to call up religious leaders around the world and take their advice!”
 She says she prefers the South Asian, post-colonial style of writing, and says, “The only one I didn’t like was Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which I thought, ‘my god, this is a tough read!’ It took me a year to finish it! A year! I just didn’t get the whole elitist part of it.”
The book she’s just finished reading is Three Cups of Tea, and tells me about the inspirational story of an American coming to work in Pakistan’s northern areas after he was nursed back to health by the warm and welcoming people of the area, when he got injured during a failed expedition to climb K-2. — Mariam Shah |
