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Less is more: You know, the pre-smartphone generation was smarter

Window Seat
Last Updated 19 September 2020, 19:17 IST

My grandmother Padmini turned 99 last week. One year closer to the record of spending a century on the planet – the same planet where many people half or even quarter her age are already finding it a drudgery to be.

On the day of her birthday, all of us cousins, aunts, grand-uncles and nieces broke our self-imposed Covid-19 house arrest and landed at our uncle’s; masks on our mouths, wishes on our mind. We stood surrounding her bed, to which she is mostly confined for the past two years of what was earlier an extremely active and independent life. The clan’s youngest, her five-year-old great-grandson, put a dunce cap on her and on himself. His mother placed a home-baked cake before her, and the mass Happy Birthday opera began for Padmini Paati. An uncle did a live-video to an uncle abroad. That uncle in the video wanted to wish his mom, but she couldn’t hear. Nobody could hear anybody. Through the next 15 minutes, I watched as someone made paati’s soft, wrinkled hands hold a knife, cut through the eggless crust, fed her a piece, someone fed her one more, all the great-granddaughters pouted for a selfie around her, and she quietly smiled through it all. An aunt remarked, “How sweet of her to not protest. Guys, if I get to be her age, don’t put me through this torture!”

Paati, while visiting my place a decade ago in her active days, had told me how in her childhood, no one among her nine siblings remembered birthdays or even if they did, didn’t think much about the day. “Amma would make some sweet, and we would visit the temple, that’s all.” She who didn’t miss ‘celebrating’ all those 85-90 years, bore this cake-and-candle cacophony, too, with the same grace.

There is something to be learnt from the generation that did not make a big deal of stuff. People who knew to be content without anything; and happy when life gave them something. Paalige bandidhu Panchamrutha: What comes to you as your share, treat it like nectar. Or was it that the people of a poor country, where ‘less’ was the default setting, were just resigned to it? Less salary, less luxury, it was up to you to nevertheless live life happily. As more wealth came, came along the dil that maange more.

While aspiration isn’t a bad thing, has it led to us becoming happier? Look no further for the answer to that question than our TV channels that for the past 100 days have chucked the good old values of decency and civility, under the garb of probing a popular actor’s death, by suicide or by alleged murder. But more than helping crack the case, the spinoffs and sub-plots of that coverage have thrown at us the picture of an India that seems dysfunctional, full of deceit, disquiet, distrust. Those who have been around for a few decades know that life isn’t as bad as the Indian media can make you believe it is, but no one is telling that to the young. In a social media post, a friend said, “I am turning 30 this week and bro, the world I see seems a scary place to grow older in.”

Why does youth feel like a burden to some? How does age sit lightly on some others?

Recently, when we had a festival and I could not invite anyone over, I decided that I would instead go and drop off the sweets at the homes of people who matter much to me. Among those was the father of a Mumbai friend who lives in a huge house in Bengaluru all by himself. I entered his gate and walked around in his garden full of fruit trees and vegetable shrubs that he himself tends to. Uncle V handed over a fresh bunch of moringa leaves, telling me in detail how to cook it. “Wow, I thought you didn’t know cooking, you have now become a chef or what!” I teased him.

“You see, this (Covid-19) phase, the maid had to stop coming. So, I started seeing YouTube videos and cooking. Simple,” said Uncle V, who turned 84 this year. “Anyway, I am glad you came now at 2, my Yoga class starts at 3 pm.”

“Great. Who is your teacher?” I asked.

“What do you mean? I am the one. What Yoga I learnt before, I now teach all my fellow senior citizens, online.”

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(Published 19 September 2020, 18:51 IST)

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