Growing old gracefully, surreptitiously and very slowly

I have a simple objective: to grow old gracefully, surreptitiously and, most important, very slowly. And I might achieve it if I did not have to fill out application forms or talk to people.

Unfortunately I have to do both, regularly. I fill an application form of some form every week. It’s needed for everything nowadays: to buy air tickets; to open bank accounts; to close bank accounts; to purchase insurance; to rent cars; to join loyalty programs and even to ask questions on some snooty websites. The forms may differ in size, colour and font size, but they are identical in one respect: they want to know my age.

Before the internet era, revealing one’s age on a form was less demeaning. Printed forms had age brackets so one could hide within a comfortable range like “35-49 years” without getting into intimate details. But today’s electronic forms want you to select your exact year of birth from a drop-down menu that starts with the current year (to ensure infants can enrol) and goes down one painful year at a time. I find I have to scroll down several pages before finding my birth-year and often there isn’t much room to scroll downwards after that. Such drop-down menus are patently biased towards youth. A friend of mine suggests that they should reverse the list by starting with 1880 and going downwards till the current year so that maturity is respected, while youth does the scrolling. However, while this will mean we scroll down less, it will make us stand out because we have to scroll down less. Like transferring a heavy burden from your left hand to your right, it will merely reposition the problem without solving it.

I would like websites to make the lists completely random. For example, they could start at 1975, jump to 2002, come back to 1955 and then bound away to 1999. You may find it a trifle cumbersome to find your year of birth, but because the list is not biased by age or order or logic, youngsters will find it equally difficult. And think of the fun of hunting for your elusive year of birth and the joy of accomplishment when, after 20 minutes of painstaking search, you suddenly locate it nestled inconspicuously between 1892 and 2007. You will experience the same sense of achievement that you felt in middle school when you solved an algebra problem.

But while we wait for websites to randomise their drop-down menus, let’s talk about the other factor preventing me from aging with aplomb: people who, with no provocation, bring up my age in conversation.

The other day, a slip of a boy – no more than 35 years old – opened his heart to me.

“I got a nasty shock this morning,” he said, rubbing his head, “I discovered my first grey hair. It’s a horrible, depressing feeling right here.” He pointed to his stomach. Then he looked at me and perked up visibly. “But you know what I’m talking about!” he cried, his depression forgotten, “You must have known it for the last 20 years? Or perhaps 30?”

On another occasion, I was talking about cricket to a management trainee seated next to me on a flight, when he suddenly asked “How old are you?” just like that, out of the blue.

“Why?” I said coldly.

“Well, you’re raving about players like G. Vishwanath and Srikanth from a bygone era. I wasn’t even born when Vishwanath retired.” He laughed nastily.

“The loss is yours,” I said.

“Maybe, but what’s your age?” he said doggedly.

“You shouldn’t ask someone their age,” I said, “They should have taught you that before you graduated from school… two years ago.”

“But you’re a man and I didn’t enquire about your salary,” he said, “After all, one should never ask a woman her age and a man what he gets’”

“Who taught you that nonsense?”

“Sunil Gavaskar – your hero!” he said, triumphantly. He did a search on his laptop; then turned its screen so I could read an article where Gavaskar’s quote had appeared (apparently in response to a reporter’s query about how much money the Board of Control for Cricket in India owed him). 

That sums up today’s youth for you: ready to pick up some meaningless quotation from Sunil Gavaskar instead of his cover drive.