My father once made a remarkable observation. ‘For ages I was
told,’ he wryly said, ‘that I was too young for a lot of things….and then
before I knew what, people started saying that I was too old. Whenever was I
ever just the right age?’
I have had somewhat the same problem all my life. It has been
aggravated by the fact that I am a teacher by profession, and I try to keep in
touch with a lot of ex students, and so I am forced to watch little kids grow
up (well, grow bigger, fatter, more conceited and uptight at least) all the
time. It doesn’t help that I have a very long and acute memory, so that
anyone’s current affectations clash violently with all the foolishness and
vapidness of theirs that I vividly remember.
And it is a very strange and common disease that people are so
sensitive about age. Class ten-ers will pooh pooh those in class five, a
college goer will sniff at class ten-ers, those who have entered working and/or
married life will sneer at college goers as ‘just kids’… and so it goes on.
Funny they all assume that they themselves have grown much wiser and sharper in
the few years that have passed since they were that age themselves, entirely
and happily oblivious of the fact that most of them haven’t really matured one
whit: they have merely blended with the crowd of the benighted, most of them,
and after all, as I love to say, A fool when he grows old simply becomes an old
fool!
‘Oh, but she’s so young’,
I have heard people say in their twenties and in their fifties. When does a
person stop being ‘too young’? Khushwant Singh died aged 99 only a few days
ago, so he might easily have said that about me, right, me, at 51, after all I
have learnt and seen and done lifelong, and 33 years of teaching? And what can
you say of people who call my daughter ‘too young’ because they are ten-twelve
years older, but forget how much older I am when they talk to me? Oh, and just
by the way, they get mightily offended when I say I get the feeling that I am
talking to a much more grown up person when I deal with my daughter than the
likes of them…
.JPG)
