Melvin Durai
The average height of a man in India is about 5-foot-5 (165 cm), while the average height of a woman is 5 feet (152.6 cm). How you compare to these averages may determine whether you consider yourself “short” or “tall,” but so might other factors. You may be 5-foot-4 and consider yourself tall, especially if your entire village is less than five feet tall. You may be 5-foot-10 and consider yourself short, especially if your best friend is 6-foot-10 basketballer Princepal Singh.
Whatever your height, if you’d like to be a little taller, there are several options you can consider. As I noted in a recent column, one way to get taller is to eat great quantities of roti, paneer, chana masala, and butter chicken. Eating a lot of Punjabi food may indeed help you grow tall, just as it has for Princepal Singh, as well as 7-foot-2 Satnam Singh and many others. The average height of a man in Patiala, Punjab, is 5-foot-10, which probably has more to do with nutrition than genes.
But here’s a warning: switching your diet to Punjabi cuisine won’t work if you’re 40 years old. You need to be a teenager or younger for it to work – and there are no guarantees. Eating lots of protein-rich foods may give you a few inches, but don’t complain if it’s not your height that increases, but your width.
A more reliable way to become taller is to wear elevator shoes. These are not high-heeled shoes, but special shoes with height-boosting insoles, which can discreetly add as many as five inches to your height. One day, you are 5-foot-5, the next day you are 5-foot-10. If anyone asks you the secret to your sudden growth spurt, you can say that you visited a Punjabi buffet.
The problem with height-enhancing shoes is that they’re not a permanent solution. A man may be able to convince a prospective bride that he’s really 5-foot-10, but once they get married, he’ll have the thorny predicament of having to wear his shoes to bed. Otherwise his new bride will start to get suspicious.
Bride: “Hey, what happened? Looks like you lost a few inches.”
Man: “Are you talking about my height or something else?”
Bride: “Your height, of course. You seem shorter.”
Man: “Oh, I’m just shrinking myself, so I can give you more room on the bed.”
If elevator shoes do not serve your needs well, you may consider something rather drastic to enhance your height: surgery.
Yes, you can do what 28-year-old Alphonso Flores of Dallas, Texas, did. He was 5-foot-11, but wanted to be over six feet tall. It was a desire he had carried since age 12 and he achieved it by visiting Dr. Kevin Debiparshad of The LimbplastX Institute of Las Vegas.
Debiparshad performed a procedure that increased the length of Flores’ femurs (thigh bones), making him 6-foot-1. He is taller by two inches, but his bank balance is shorter by $75,000 (almost Rs 55 lakh).
The surgery involved making a few incisions and placing an implant in the hollow of the bone. The implant increases the length of the bone by a millimeter each day. Using this method, Debiparshad can increase a patient’s height by as much as six inches.
“I really wanted to be more like my heroes,” Flores told The Daily Mail. “All of my heroes were super tall. Particularly people like Michael Jordan, Phil Jackson, Kobe Bryant, and of course my father.”
But then he added this: “I highly encourage people to really look into themselves before they commit to having the surgery, and really think about why they are doing this to ensure that it’s for the right reason.”
Indeed, if you’re 5-foot-11, you probably shouldn’t have this surgery. If you have Rs 55 lakh lying around, just think of how much roti, paneer, chana masala, and butter chicken you could buy for the children in your city.