Skip to main content

Aging Gracefully

My cat who is wiser than me


When I was a boy I used to think that anyone who hit the age of 30 was middle-aged and anyone whose hairline showed shades of grey was antique. Maybe that’s why I refused to grow up. When I hit 30 I continued to behave as if I was 18 and now that I have no black hair left on my pate I behave as if I was 30. 

My school closed today for the summer break. My students met me personally to wish me “Happy Holiday” and some of them threatened to visit me at my residence during the break. I felt like 18 once again.

What people call maturity is something I never learnt. I think I was incapable of learning it. I think the child in me is hyperactive. I love to play with my cat like a little boy until the cat gets bored of the game. I feel sad when he is bored. Even the cat thinks I’m too silly at times.

I cannot grow up, I’m pretty sure. I have always been immature, quite silly by the world’s normal standards. Do people change really as they grow up? I wondered. The behaviour of my students today, the last day of school, made me ask that question. The tear drops that welled up in the eyes of one student (an exceptional case, no doubt) made me shudder. Have I gone wrong somewhere, I wondered.

I failed to grow up, I consoled myself. Do people really grow up? Isn’t it rather about certain genetic makeup? Or is it about learning to play certain games?

Did Mark Antony grow up? Did Cleopatra? What about Othello or Hamlet? Tragedy is the grand finale for those who fail to grow up. And those who really grow up belong to fiction only, I think. Woody Allen's kind of fiction, not Shakespeare's. The real characters remain what they are. Some facades are added on the way to make the character look good, better than the original. Adding those facades is what growing up gracefully is about. Isn’t it?


Comments

  1. Jyotirmoy SarkarMarch 30, 2019 at 4:25 PM

    There is always a child in us but we have to hide it for various reasons...i have always believed it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 30, 2019 at 5:40 PM

      I agree with you. My problem is the child is beyond my control 😛

      Delete
  2. Murthy K v v sMarch 31, 2019 at 4:04 PM

    The play is to be played until the moment comes.You replicated mine in your lines.Happy to read it sir.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

Are human systems repressive?

Salma I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion. Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer. Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.” Rajathi was...
12 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Roles we Play

When I saw the above picture of Narendra Modi in the latest issue of India Today , what rushed to my mind instantly was a Malayalam film song Veshangal Janmangal … Life is a series of roles dressed up for the occasion. There are different costumes for celebrations and mourning, and there are people who can shed one and move into the other instantly. Are your smiles genuine? Do your tears mean sadness? Or, are they all costumes that suit the occasion? Are you just an actor who plays certain roles? Is the entire cosmos just a gigantic theatre for you? Where can we find the real you beneath all the costumes you keep changing day in and day out? Have you relinquished dharma in favour of cravings? Truth over expediency?  
10 comments
Read more