I don’t see people covering up their age as an attempt to beguile the opposite sex with their “breeding-prowess”. (Although, I do think that Darwin always make sense.) But in modern times, I see it as an ostentatiously attempt to show how much one has achieved at his work, study, and discipline by the time he has reached a certain age-milestone. Give our slothful nature; one can safely assume that most of us fall short of these milestones. (Newton would have rightly blamed the ‘inertial’ nature-of-existence for it.) Even the ‘child-prodigies’ who do get up to the mark, will make sure that they heighten the aura of ‘awe’ around them by further clipping the numbers, thus again intensifying the war of numbers where small is beautiful.
Another reason people lie about their number is because everyone does so. So it is a chain reaction. So if a certain Mrs. X is “honestly” stating her age to be ‘N’, we’ll by default equate ‘N’ to ‘N+2’ and because we’ll equate it to ‘N+2’, Mrs. X has no other option but to lie her number by a margin of ‘2’. This age-old problem, given the number of young people our country boasts of, is not surprising. With the advent of T20s (which sounds misnomer to me given that the flamboyant performers are often in their 40s!) the number-theory will continue be the opium of the masses. (RIP Karl Marx)
The reason age and T20 has compelled me to contemplate on this Sunday afternoon when I’d ideally be fulfilling my weekly quota of sleep, is because of a turned-twenty whose enthusiasm for her twentieth birth date saw no trough since the beginning of the month. (In fact, her birth date now is as much surprise to me as ice in Iceland) Contrarily, my twentieth birth-date, a couple of years ago, was full-filled with sadness, nostalgia and melancholy. I wished “old” people were as heroic as they are in Gabriel Marquez’s novels. It was a huge transition for me but not a part of it was visible or discernible. I don’t know about others, but I have weird fascination to age-numbers. I’d love to be 17, 19, 22, 27, 29, 31, 37, 41 or 47. But birth-dates apart from these will inadvertently make me sad. I observe that most of these numbers are primes. The Pythagoreans believed that God lies in numbers. The reason, they said, God created the world in six-days is because 6 is the first perfect number (1+2+3) and not the other way round.
My next birth-date beckons me in around two-month time and given that I am about to lose the fancy number I hold, I wish I could enjoy all my birth-dates as profusely as others do. Given the loony ways my thoughts flow, I don’t know what this birth-date has in store for me. But all my benevolent wishes to a friend, confidante, and an “allayer-of-all-maladies” on her twentieth birth-date. I’ll skip my cynical sarcasm-laced adjectives for you are now impervious to them. But amazing person you are. Enjoy your day.
©Rakesh 2011
