Riding Age, Standing Still

 

 

A

ge is a peculiar creature. Despite riding it, you keep mapping yourself by events as your coordinates, and end up staying stationary.

Take this month. By its end, conventional wisdom says I will be a year older. Yet I am still in my yesteryears! I map myself to events (I won't name them, as I may be beaten up by the people involved) that I still cherish, and I keep thinking of ways to reenact them. I know I cannot bring back the time when those things happened, so a reenactment would not even be a mirror image. But… the ones who are picky about words will pull me up for saying "yesteryears" while talking about staying at the same spot agewise. Frankly, now that I am 67, I don't give a damn!

This, again, is strange. For all practical purposes, my mind feels as young as it perceivably did 30 years ago. Yet when it comes to disenchantment and expressing displeasure, I never fail to use my age as a shield! That is a contradiction which needs to be resolved.

Here is another thing that has started stealing my sleep lately. When we say, "He is still young," are we actually measuring the temporal distance between his age now and his expected time of death? By that count, does one become old by proximity to one's end point?

The calendar age is like the distance on a car's meter: how many kilometres the car has travelled since it started rolling. In our case, it is the distance, by calendar, from the date of birth. But what about being old?

I started learning Spanish when I was 65. Now I get introduced at social events as the man who learnt Spanish in his very advanced years! Curious eyes instantly start measuring me up. "Wow! Look at that guy!" Yet at the same event, a youngster would perhaps be introduced as someone who speaks so many languages, Spanish included, with no reference to his age at all.

Now I know what they actually mean. They mean this guy is about to reach his last milepost in breathing, and he doesn't even realise it! Be that as it may, I now understand that the stage of your life is being measured by the distance to your expected time of death, and that is not something we should approve of.

Is anyone listening?

Pix: Gemini

I did the Everest, but the headline screamed something else

 

C

limbing Everest is still a big deal, but not as much as it was during the times of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. So, when they started congratulating me for writing an article about the Indian economy in Spanish that got published in Trobairitz, a Spanish magazine from Argentina, I had mixed feelings. It pumped my ego, but I must confess that the refrain of the messages, bar none, hurt me as well. Perhaps the same way the latter-day Hillarys and Tenzings feel for not being the pioneers.

The facts first. Two years back, when I started learning Spanish, I didn’t have a clue as to what the endpoint of this exercise would be. It was more of an impulse than a calculated decision. The course was cheap, some of my acquaintances had done it, and brushing up on my rusty French was far too expensive. Furthermore, the ecosystem aligned with my Bengali middle-class sentiments to a great extent. Well, almost. I was 64 then and a tad away from being referred to as a doddering, senile being, my own feeling to the contrary notwithstanding. So, I needed to prove it to myself – that I could still do it, like the ones who are climbing the Everest now. I will not be a pioneer, but who cared, if I could prove to myself that my feelings about not being old were rooted and they were not just bravado would be enough to keep me going for a few more years with confidence, little knowing what the future held.

I still recall the day I took the final exam. Well, it was more like supine than sitting. I had sustained a spinal injury and was in the hospital when the exam happened. The institute was gracious enough to offer me an alternative date, but my ego kicked in. I wanted to compete with my compañoros and check my performance. But on the day of the examination, my hospital cabin transformed into a circus ring. Somehow, the word had spread that the accident-patient-uncle was taking an exam at the hospital.

My nurse on duty came in at 6 am to prepare me for the day. The exam was supposed to start at 7. I had ample time. But other nurses started coming in from 6.45 onwards on one pretext or another. And then they stayed back.

I must say that they were also eager to ensure that I was as comfortable as they could make me. One got hold of a hospital table of a height that would be comfortable for me to write on the laptop. Another was continuously checking whether the wifi was working correctly. It was, in fact, quite a touching experience. And that I qualified at the top of the class remains another tale to tell!

A confession – I still struggle to express myself in Spanish. I still need dictionaries and grammar checks while writing, but I can do it in a reasonably competent way.

One thing led to another. My editor from another life, a person of huge academic capability, somehow has always been unreasonably sympathetically disposed towards me. I, at times, have the feeling that it’s more out of pity towards my intellectual shortcomings than anything else. Que sea lo que sea or que será, será, it was Anirban Chattopadhyay of Anandabazar Patrika and my teacher, Dibyajyoti Mukhopadhyay, who were responsible for me doing the Tenzing act in Spanish.

To cut a long story short, had it not been for them, I wouldn’t have dared to accept this challenge. Now it is done. The accolades are coming in, not for the content that got published though, but for the doddering, near senile old crap proving himself as being not so old. I did the Everest, but the headline is a doddering fellow who defied senility to make it there.

You can check the veracity by clicking on this link

Pix Courtesy Chatgpt

https://online.fliphtml5.com/uxhgi/Trobairitz-34---Enero-de-2026/#p=9

Why can’t they be on my page?

S

ome things are so obvious that they stare you in the face. But you, being you, refuse to accept them as such. So, you keep boring people to death and unnecessarily make yourself odious. Last year was a year of self-discovery for me, as I realised I am similarly flawed (and, I must admit, odious) ad nauseam.

Not that it was something new. My wife, of a couple of years shy of four decades, and my son, a hombre of 36, have been telling me the same since the day they met me. The manner of registering the protest and the indignation at my being odious has undergone changes, at times radically, but the content has remained the same.

My son, when he was a week old (that is when we met), started on the path of reminding me of my shortcomings by wailing loudly whenever I spoke, which, over time, has found words that fall shy of admonishment. And she who shouldn’t be named has also honed her tools to keep my mouth under a tight leash!

But the trouble begins when they are not around. I was reading The Difficulty of Being Good by Gurcharan Das. Now that he is perceived to be old (he was then on the wrong side of seventy when he wrote that), the behaviour of his wife and children has changed towards him from being the protected ones to the protectors of him! And he finds it strange as he does find it difficult to discern any behavioural shift in his own existence from what he was before!

I dare say that I found a resonance in his reflections. From my ability to drive to all that I am hasn’t changed. I still find women, especially the ones with minds of their own, more attractive (whether the reverse is true is still a matter of conjecture, though) than men, and I still find men more attractive than women while goofing at the club. But they who have the leash will not concur. Need I really say what their opinion is about it!

There are, of course, differences. I mean, Gurcharan Das is a Harvard alumnus with an enviable track record of successes. I have been a common man with an intolerably mediocre existence. Yet, funnily, he and I still have a common ground when it comes to existential dilemma! That indeed was one happy note to end the year with.