Forty, and getting younger

Not only are 40-somethings looking hot and happening, things are happening to them too... They are dating, getting married, having children or taking up adventure sport, finds out Rachna Bisht-Rawat.

With her pixie haircut and short dresses that show off her toned legs, 48-year-old Noopur Panwar turns male heads wherever she goes.

Very recently it was on a beach in Malaysia where she did some deep sea diving to complete the required number of dives for her diver level 2 certificate.

Bharatnatyam dancer and ardent trekker Meera Mohan, a gorgeous 47, does kickboxing and pilate workouts each morning and laughs that her young dance instructor at Bangalore’s Nrityarutya thought she was a college student and almost went into shock when she told her that she had recently got her daughter married.

Amitabh Gautam, MD of a media production house, says at 43 he’s wearing shirts in colours like peach and blue shoes (though not together); something that he would have never dared to do when he was 20. He’s also flying Cessna 170 planes, paragliding, sailing and planning to not only skydive but also open India’s first skydiving drop zone soon.

The 40 year olds, they seem to be getting younger each day. Right from their fitness to the  way they dress and think, to the things they do for a kick. Panwar went ahead and got herself a huge tattoo on her back to mark her 25th wedding anniversary. “Twenty-five years of married life was a huge landmark for me and I wanted to do something that would stay with me forever so I decided to get a tattoo symbolising my precious family.”

She now has four pretty butterflies hovering on her back – one each for  her husband and herself and two for her strapping college going sons. Since tattoos are addictive, she plans to get another one done on her 50th birthday, dedicated to the women in her life — mom, sisters, friends etc.

Mohan gives stage performances, goes for zumba classes and yoga, says she never thinks of herself as old and often when she goes trekking with below 30 year olds, they can never imagine that she is old enough to be their mother.

And Gautam says he finds himself wearing bolder colours now, has 10 pairs of jeans (seven more than what he had in college) and can relate completely to the 20 somethings who work in his company. In fact, only last week he quit smoking in tandem with a young colleague.

“While he’s still smoking on weekends, I’ve given up completely,” he says.

People in their 40s are doing almost everything that we equated with youth till about a decade back. They are getting married for the first time at 40, with society no longer shaking its head at this “old-age bad behaviour”. They are happily having babies at 40 thanks to the advancements in science that have made it possible for women who put careers first to start a family at an age that was till some time back equated with menopause.

What’s more, 40 year olds have even started stepping out of boring careers and staid jobs to pursue something that they had always wanted to do in their life. “You suddenly realise that there is so much more left in life to do and no time to bother with things that hardly matter,” says Gautam.

Professional life coach and author Malti Bhojwani, herself an attractive 41, says the 40s now mean the same as what the 20s meant till a while back — being in the pink of health, peak of your life. “Forty year olds are confident, we’ve accepted our personalities, capabilities, bodies and looks as they are and we’re not awkward or shy anymore. Most of us have gone past the need to please or conform and we don’t need to live up to being the “good girl” or “boy” anymore.”

For the ones who are single or divorced, it’s empowering to be older, wiser and more experienced in matters of the heart too. We’ve honed our intuition through our past experiences, we know ourselves better and know how to rotate around our own axis instead of around anyone else’s,” she says, adding that this emotional independence makes us more attractive too and more adept at choosing a new partner.

Fact is, that there has been an increase in the over 40 crowds joining dating/matrimonial sites. Not only are they dating  like 20-somethings, they are often dating 20 somethings too. Film director Anurag Kashyap, 40, is married to Kalki Koechlin, 28.

Till sometime back the film industry's hottest couple was Salman Khan (in his 40s) and Katrina Kaif (in her 20s). Age once sounded the death knell for women in the film industry but that no longer holds true. The sexy leading lady is often nearing 40 and a strong draw at the box office. Jennifer Anniston and Haley Berry are anything but old-maids in Hollywood.

Closer home Madhuri Dixit, 45, Kajol, 38, and Karishma Kapoor, 38, are making bold comebacks. Older men have always had it good in the film industry — Shah Rukh, Salman, Aamir are all in their 40s — but now women are enjoying longer careers too.

And if 40s are the new twenties, then the 60s can only be the new 30s. Mumbai-based Narayan Choudhary, 63, recently returned from a trek to the glacial lake of Roopkund in the Garhwal Himalayas at 16,000 feet.

He did the 40 plus km arduous climb that many younger people dropped out of, in record time. Earlier he has done Amarnath, Kedarnath and even the Kailash Mansarovar trek. “I started trekking seriously after my retirement at 58,” he says. He often goes for weekend treks with younger people and finds himself fitter than many of them. “Till a decade back, people my age would sit at home after retirement and look after their grandchildren.

Maybe they didn’t have the vision, or the financial security or there was pressure from society to behave a certain way but I have never thought like that. People who don’t know my age often feel I’m not more than 45,” he says, grinning like a happy teenager.
Now that’s something the 40 somethings (who we are convinced are actually only 20 something) can look forward to.