Hmmm!

The thing about thinking is that it takes tangents one never thought existed. I mean, I began by marvelling at the lovely couple Lalu and Rabri make and the next thing I knew, an average Indian buffalo’s calorie count haunted my thoughts. Now, if this was not bad enough, the discussion with the various voices in my head (do you have your own set of voices? Please share… I am eager to know, or not, whatever) steered towards age and how time is flying away. One voice, definitely the baritone of Om Puri, pronounced, in a distinct Punjabi flavoured English, “Life begins at 25 ji.” A more rebellious Sania Mirza (famous for her so called outrageous T-shirts) argued, “Well they just keep altering the years to make the process of aging seem easy.” “Hmmm.”



That is me thinking, in case you did not get the ‘Hmmm’. I made a mental note of the indicators of aging. Making mental notes is a commendable job, especially if I am the one doing the work. You see, I tend to be doing the thinking job of 20 people with my one brain, although God was not too generous with the grey matter. At least this is what I learnt about myself in the last shrink session or to be politically correct, in my last therapy session.

Not one to digress, I was hoping to spread despair and aging blues across the blogsphere by listing the indicators of aging. I figured spreading the joy has become such a cliché that it was time to usher in a new era of radiating depression (crossing my fingers that this becomes a cliché too… come on get inspired use the phrase as frequently as you can). I hope by now you are dying to read more.

So you know that age is catching up and leaving you, the centre of the party, the live wire, the most sought after person in college, way behind when:

1. It is your birthday and you get just four calls at 12 in the night.

2. Two of those are from your middle-aged relatives, who want to call at 12 in a bid to convince you that they are still young and ‘hip’.

3. Someone says the word ‘hip’ and you think of the rear area of the human anatomy.

4. Or worse, you understand the cooler slang it used to stand for some decades ago.

5. You discuss the good old days of Doordarshan any and every time more than 2, or even just 2, people of your age group meet.

6. Or worse, you discuss, Ek chidya, Gul gulshan gulfam, Udaan, Ramayan, Mahabharat, with the Om Puri, Sania Mirza, SRK voices in your head.

7. You can barely recall names of the people you went to school with for 12 years or those you shared college space with for the most fantastic 3 years of your life.

8. The autowalas, rickshawalas, dukaan wale bhaiya, ice-cream vendor, subziwala, tailors, start calling you madam rather than Gudiya, or bitiya.

9. You begin to prefer calling up people rather than texting them (or again, is it just me?)

10. Lastly, you become so unbelievably, wonderfully cynical that posts like these not only make you laugh, but also fail to have the desired effect of depressing you. (for the umpteenth time, is it just me or the world is going mad with me?)

Fortunately, I can say with confidence that I have never personally experienced any of these 10 instances. Thank God that our media ethics professor drilled into our blood the art of lying confidently.

And as the cherry on top of this sour cake of a post, in public interest, I must remind you once again that if you are wasting your time reading blogs at work… Dude you are in trouble. Bosses just need an excuse to cut costs, hope your ‘hip’ is safe. In case you do get the axe, look at the silver lining, you can come back to read more of my work while you age. :-)