What’s this New India’s rage against age?

Midlife Musings

The year of all years shuffles to a close, and already, much artificial optimism is being whipped up for the next.

We are told by our most, arguably only, reliable source that is so low on facts that it needs no fact-checking, that a Make-in-India vaccine may be ready for roll-out in the next few weeks. I am prepared with my arms bared for any, for all vaccines, of all origins, even those from suspicious sources and sub-par supply chains. In true ‘New India’ style, I have decided to bide this waiting time for that one instance of ’acchhe din’ by fiddling around with the future, playing a game. The game is that, besides myself and my immediate family, who is that one other person in the whole wide world I want to see at the absolute front of the Covid-19 vaccination queue?

For me, the answer lies in a photograph -- of Sukhdev Singh, the moonshine-bright white-bearded Sikh farmer from Punjab’s Kapurthala district, one amongst lakhs of women and men farmers currently protesting the new farm laws. Laws that New India’s foot soldiers say these people have been misled to misunderstand, before they found their way, not needing New India’s navigational help, to Delhi’s borders to withstand hardships that New India is already buckling under.

Sukhdev Singh’s photograph comes alive with his ageless agility against a policeman’s raised ‘lathi’ (or cane). For me, it needed no video to kill the viral lies. Singh understands. The cognitive disability is New India’s, and that is what will be India’s Achilles’ heel. And in all humility, together with Singh, I too understand, because, whilst he and I are separated by many differences and a few decades, we are both at the receiving end of New India’s rage against age. The psychological price we, of a certain age, pay is hate. I encounter this regularly, especially since I ceased to colour my hair.

Some of the reactions are comprehensible. My daughter has had to endure the peculiar tween horror of explaining to a mate that the woman who waited distractedly at the bus stop was not her grandmother.

Admittedly, the last nail in my carefully coiffed coffin of ‘global’ colour was when I went and got myself the ‘mom bob’, or the ‘pol mob’ as it is also called, to indicate a personally and politically strident woman. The personality re-order was now not just complete, but also broadcast. My daughter’s father has had to learn to conceal occasional seepages of disappointment and disdain at me. At worst, there’s been some plain old-fashioned disgust, not entirely at my salt ‘n’ pepper, but at who I might have become. But that is easily remedied with a reminder that our long togetherness must leave some trace. My octogenarian mother has also found my decision discomfiting as this abandonment of my vanity reveals her tight hold over hers. But all this just classifies us as yet another ‘happy’ Hindustani family.

The particular strain of Make-in-India hate that is confounding is what the likes of Sukhdev Singh and I get from New India’s new women and men. Unlike the hate that is schooled in the history department of the University of WhatsApp, this hate is designed to debase merely on the fact of a person’s age. What makes these literate but under-educated, un- or under-employed New Indians name-call me when I have something contrary to say? What is it that prevents them from making a cogent counter-argument that isn’t just ageist abuse? It’s not arrogance. It’s under confidence. And it’s Fear.

The fear that, despite the ‘mandirs’ being built where the ‘masjids’ are, they themselves may never make good, as so many of us did just a decade or two ago, simply by being individuals and believing in our youth. Could it be that New India’s youth fears that their slogan-shouting mouths may forever remain open for their next morsel of food? Indeed, the emasculation of New India’s uncouth youth needs no further proof than that it needs their Government to secure their potential partners from being ‘taken’ by the ‘Other’, or the on-repeat reassurance, again from their Government, that someday, they may become atmanirbhar.

Does the New Indian really believe that only one man speaks the truth? If there was a vaccine against the misuse of our youth, I, and I’m sure Sukhdev Singh, too, would put these New Indians ahead in the queue.

(Indu Anand gives melancholic one-star reviews to marriage, motherhood, most men, and midlife @Indu.A.Anand)