How young are you?

youth matters

When you first heard ‘youth is wasted on the young’, you were young enough for the quote to be wasted on you. And while the internet debates whether George Bernard Shaw said it or Oscar Wilde, it is the kind of observation everyone feels they said it first when they do get around to saying it at some point in their life — later rather than sooner.

Best not to peek into the crystal ball: yes, you are going to age... and age and age. Each minute, hour, day, week, month, year, this is what you do even while doing nothing — grow old. Benjamin Button is only a fictional character, like Peter Pan, played by Brad Pitt, and you should see his make-up bills! This is what any fortune teller will tell you for free, that you are going to be older. Look, don’t hate the psychic, hate the future, okay?

You must have read the recent headline: 80 is the new 40. Which means, mathematically speaking, 40 is the new 20, and at 20 you are just a preemie in an incubator. Maybe what we really want to hear is: ‘You look young enough to be a foetus! Is that an umbilical cord I see?’

The elixir of youth is what we are after. But are the bottled ones, advertised for whopping sums, worth their price? Or, is vanity draining our credit card? Women eat their placenta, men sip their pee and many swear by the ‘Human Growth Hormone’ to look two decades younger though it is an illegal kind of drug in the UK. Despite horror stories, this 300-pound self-injection is all the rage.

But, honestly, who wants to look their age? We are a forever young people; too young to die, but never (never!) too old to rock n’ roll. Thankfully, ageism has reversed its modus operandi and comes at us from the other end. While we thought our mothers could carry off only saris from the time they gave birth to us, we are loath to be sartorially written off by our own kids. Tattoos, piercings, pink hair — age really is no bar. The good news is, a smoother-skinned, wrinkle-free younger you with a flashback waistline is possible today.

All for youth

Anti-ageing creams rival only whitening creams in the market. Everyone knows at least one person (the first cousin of a neighbour’s employer’s mother-in-law perhaps) who died or lost a vital organ to slimming pills. There are creams to colour your hair, abolish the fine lines on your face, perk up saggy bits and operations to tighten you up from tip to toe.

Many industries are engaged in the mammoth sci-fi race to turn back the clock. They work inside out and outside in, with herbal tea, infusions, mud packs, belts, nips and tucks. The hosiery sector urges us to cheat, with tummy belts, corsets, contouring undergarments, control pants, which are gimmicky couture to create the illusion of slimness — everyone wants a Spanx silhouette. Technology lets us photoshop to our heart’s content: legs, necks, noses and fingers can be made to look longer, arms more sinewy and exactly like Michelle Obama’s, side profile leaner and meaner with adjustments that thin you down or add oomph.

While facials used to be something sad old aunties did in the 1980s, now college girls consider it an essential healthcare routine. There are girlie health packages, discounted on Valentine’s Day and Women’s Day, that ferret out any lurking disease within the body. We take a prescribed dose of Vitamin D at 8 am on balconies when the sun is at the right height, and regularly gauge our bone density. Where earlier women died mysteriously, courtesy some deeply held feminine secret ailment, now hysterectomies and mastectomies are part of daily conversations.

Gyms and exercise centres have us firmly by our fat — each promising to reduce us in inches and kilograms in just 10 days, if not earlier. Spas and meditation centres assure us that navel-gazing is the need of the hour and will work wonders for our complexion. As for green tea, everyone is drinking it by the bucket. You see, toxins have to be flushed from our system, for they are blind little germs with white canes, forever losing their way inside our intestines. And, as we sip this vile tasting concoction, we remember to lick our lips and gush over how addicted we are to green tea.

At social gatherings, everyone talks about how little they eat when they do eat. Gluten-free, fructose-free, sugar-free... nothing is edible anymore. Everything is air-fried and low-carb. Only someone with a death-wish will look at pasta or puris. People piously tell you to drink a lot of water. Dieticians faint if you tell them your fridge contains anything but fruit. Salads and soups are in, but even that not together. No refined flour, no salt, no oil. But just when you get that right, someone recommends a sure-fire way to lose weight by chewing on unadulterated fat! Wheatgrass shots, oats porridge, flax seeds, kale and quinoa... There are colour-based diets, diets with fancy names and diets with contents made up entirely of imported nuts.

Coconut oil is suddenly back in a big way, used by celebrities in the West not only as a moisturiser and cooking medium, but also for ‘pulling’ — swishing oil in their mouths for dental hygiene. But, while the world has discovered our coconut oil, we swear by their olive oil, about which we know little.

Cosmetic and medical surgeries meet somewhere in the middle of the human body in modern times to halt the passage of time. We are a medically fit generation, with a longer life, never mind the quality of that longevity.

Operations to the rescue

If the sunny forecast vis-a-vis life is that we don’t have to age if we don’t want to, the gloom and doom factor is perhaps the absolute rejection of what was earlier called ‘ageing gracefully’. We may not exactly mature like fine wine or even home-cooked dum biryani at the slowest simmer. In fact, we are taken kicking and screaming to the old-age home. Whatever happened to walking away into the sunset? Or the practice prior to that, in ancient times, when even kings and queens went on a one-way pilgrimage, to die peacefully at the banks of some holy river or the other.

There’s liposuction for mummy tummies — mum-tum — and for man boobs — moobs. If your neighbour no longer smiles at you in the lift, blame Botox; if you look closely, she is smiling, but it is just that her cheeks can’t move! In fact, if her house is on fire some day, she will be miming ‘help, help’ through her window and you will keep waving back amiably at her, until of course your own house catches fire and you will understand what she was saying, but by then it will be too late.

Noses are not just for breathing. From what can be made out from the passionate queries to plastic surgeons in magazines, no one stops with one rhinoplasty procedure. It seems like a lifelong quest — to find a nose that looks good, with one operation leading to another, and another, until the prefect nose is in place. And let’s not even talk about the celebs who go from 32 to 36 B and then one fine day, citing inconvenience and caved in assets, go back to 32. The latest to change her mind about her bust-line is Katie Price.

There’s zumba and kickboxing and hip-hop and salsa and Bollywood dancing to trim the lard. Walk around the city and every 10 minutes or so there is a gym, and in every gym there are a hundred instructors with bulging biceps whom you pay handsomely to torture you. Most people very painstakingly get an annual membership to the best of gyms and then indulge in guilt bouts by not actually making it there. Those who go feel very virtuous and start every sentence with, ‘Today at the gym...’ They speak the language of cardio, strength training, high-intensity boot camp, protein shakes and six packs.

Mid-life crisis, a traditional must-have in your forties, has now been officially postponed to your sixties. The hit Malayalam film How Old Are you? is all about how young at heart the heroine really is, that it is never too late for anything. But then, we are all young compared to somebody or the other, and if someone fancied us back then, someone fancies us right now.

Mortality is what freaks us out, blows our cover and reveals us for the cowering creatures we are; for, we imagine that if we delay ageing, we delay death. Accidents and fatalities and terminal illnesses are all around us; every once in a while we hear of someone we knew very well, whom we saw just yesterday, suddenly gone, just like that, poof, without any warning. We try to deal with it in many ways, by writing a book, by falling in love, by micro-managing our kids’ lives, by eating austerely, running marathons...

By trying our best to stave off Father Time, we not only condemn ageing as sexist, but are opting for temporary measures. The bottomline is: when you gotta go, you gotta go. There’s no getting around that. And if we don’t give, how will the next generation and the generation after that find a toehold on this overcrowded planet?

Even if we dress in onesies and get so thin that we are not visible at certain angles, we cannot stay static all our lives. And all this harum-scarum hurrying to Shangri La in the end leaves you with lighter pockets and, most often, a much older face. Looking into the mirror and then immediately at your college snaps is injurious to health. It leaves you longing for an earlier you, for a previous life, for a past that seems enviable only because it is the past. Taking flight after something you think you saw in the sky is probably not too smart. Going forward is the way of life, however much you hanker for what was, what used to be. And this reality, this you, is what you will covet tomorrow.

Of course, I worry I’ll be gone before I know it. I still have so much to do. Forget my wines, I don’t even know my beers. I want to miss nothing. And I definitely want to be around when my grandkids call their moms — my daughters — ‘too old’.