Sixty at Sixty
“Really! I can’t believe you are sixty!” exclaimed a colleague last month. While it was an honest compliment, I didn’t feel anything close to pride. I have always been comfortable looking, feeling, being, and acting my age. And while never regretting anything, I have always loved looking back, laughing at my younger self, and chuckling at all my stupidity.
“I love ageing gracefully,” said Mr. Sudhanshu Varma a few months back on my talk show ‘Coffee with DoSA’, and he made perfect sense. The charismatic COO of Bennett University went on to assert, “I have never used any chemicals to dye my hair and I don’t think I ever will.” Clearly enjoying his grandfatherly aura and the adulation that comes with it, he is grace personified.
I myself seem to be virtually flaunting being sixty. I don’t think I ever flaunted being thirty, forty, or fifty! On second thoughts, I do remember doing it at eighteen, probably because getting official entry to adult movies was quite a big deal then, unlike super easy access to everything under the sun at an awkwardly early age today.
In my early thirties, when an MBA student inadvertently asked, “Uncle, what’s the syllabus for exams?”, I was hardly offended while the girl herself felt hugely embarrassed, apologising profusely. Having officially become a Chacha and a Mama at the ripe age of eighteen, being ‘uncled’ by the young girl meant little.
It was equally easy for me to unabashedly make way for tears while watching the emotionally heavy Baghban on a bus journey. This early-forties memory clearly stands out because I remember having stopped crying publicly during my teens, probably after my Mom’s untimely departure.
When I look into the mirror today, I see my Dad. He often choked on small little memories, and his eyes welled up at the slightest hint of emotion. I see no difference in the mirror, except that he was a handsome man! For someone who sang from the stage once, it is virtually impossible for me to even hum without choking on emotional words. And it’s equally routine for the eyes to well up on nostalgia.
“While I am in no rush, I definitely wish to die,” I remember asserting while challenging my student Dhanush’s research project on immortality. “Who the hell wants to be immortal?” I had wondered aloud before being informed by Dhanush that Jeff Bezos had invested millions in anti-ageing research.
I remember telling Dhanush how I treasured caressing my granny’s wrinkled hands. Had they not been wrinkled, I doubt I would hold them so fondly and so often. I had concluded saying, “I don’t wish to deprive the pleasure to my grandkids,”. I may have always wanted to remain healthy; but not young for sure.
“I am sixty now, but I still recall with a shudder how tough growing-up was, particularly in teens and early twenties, facing issues that looked virtually impossible to overcome,” I wrote in a recent mail to my students who are facing their own growth pangs. Not that I have answers for them.
And my answers, in any case, would be stonewalled by the proverbial generation gap, a weapon my daughter would invoke regularly to shut me up. The invocation has often amused me more than anything. Moreover, when the choice is between amusement and exasperation, it is wiser to choose the former at sixty.
Finally, I am not sure it’s a fair comparison, but sagging skin and creaking joints notwithstanding, being sixty at sixty feels lot more comfortable than being sixteen at sixteen, what with all those pimples and the awkward facial hair that is neither here nor there!
